Hello, WordPress!!!

I’ve decided to give WordPress a try run. There are way more services provided by WordPress than BlogSpot.

Still catching up with .NET Rocks shows. And the one I’ve listened today was about Astoria. Yahoooo!!! It’s finally here. Can’t way to start playing with the CTP bits – they were released in December.
If you haven’t heard about Astoria – listen the show yourself, you’ll enjoy it:

In simple words: Astoria is ADO.NET Data Services. It’s a Web Services layer that exposes (any) Data regardless of a data storage using a model called the Entity Data Model (EDM), an Entity-Relationship derivative. It will work by accepting an HTTP REST requests (it’s planned to expand the transports collection later) to a resource and returning back a result in the HTTP reply. The returned data currently can be in the XML or JSON formats. So Astoria is THE DB layer for the AJAX-based applications.

ADO.Net Data Services enables easily creating data services using:

1. Entity Framework data sources, which expose a conceptual model of data stored in relational databases (SQL, Oracle, DB2, MySql, etc)
2. Any IQueryable + “extensions for update” (interface to support update semantics for ADO.NET Data Services) implementation. This enables ADO.Net Data Services to expose any data store via REST-based endpoints regardless of its storage mechanism.

Here is a tease. This is how the call to Northwind will look like:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    NorthwindEntities ctx = new 
            NorthwindEntities("http://localhost:1234/Northwind.svc");
    ctx.MergeOption = MergeOption.AppendOnly;

    var q = from c in ctx.Customers
            where c.City == "London"
            orderby c.CompanyName
            select c;

    foreach (var cust in q)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(cust.CompanyName);
    }
}

So stay tuned. I’m going to talk more in details about Astoria.

I should say ADO.NET Data Services, but it’s soooo looooong. May be we should call it ADS.NET – A(do) D(ata) S(serviced) . NET ?

By the way, ADO stands for ActiveX Data Services. Where is ActiveX in all this?

Technorati: Astoria