Microsoft has announced the December CTP of Project Astoria, whose new name is the ADO.NET Data Services Framework, is available now as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions preview release.
This is an important release for the ADO.NET Data Services team because it's the first true CTP. Prior releases were using a prototype code base and since then the team started coding from scratch and engineered from the ground up from lessons learned during the initial prototyping.
Available in this CTP are:
-
Support to create ADO.NET Data Services backed by:
- A relational database by leveraging the Entity Framework.
- Any data source (file, web service, custom store, application logic layer, etc)
- Serialization Formats:
- Industry standard AtomPub serialization
- JSON serialization
- Business Logic & Validation
- Insert custom business/validation logic into the Request/response processing pipeline
- simple infrastructure to build custom access policy
- Access Control
- Easily control the resources viewable from a data service
- Simple HTTP interface
- Any platform with an HTTP stack can easily consume a data service
- Designed to leverage HTTP semantics and infrastructure already deployed at large
- Client libraries:
- .NET Framework
- ASP.NET AJAX
- Silverlight (coming soon)
Pablo Castro, from the ADO.NET Data Services team, suggests switching to this CTP from any future work:
Documentation for the ADO.NET Data Services is available through the MS Live Labs web site and the CTP of the ADO.NET Data Services can be downloaded from the ASP.NET web site Extensions Preview.Formats, APIs, URLs and other interface elements have been extensively revisited so I would recommend that you switch to the new CTP for any future work.
This CTP is compatible with the RTM version of Visual Studio 2008, so you can finally move off intermediate builds of it when working with Astoria.