SyncEXPERT

I just got back from the h^3 launch event in LA and found a few nifty-cool things waiting for me in my aggregator. First, the ever practical (and prolific) Julie Lerman is writing a book on the ADO.NET Entity Framework for our friends at O’Reilly. Very cool indeed.

Also waiting for me was the news that Ruurd Boeke has started the EFContrib project over on Codeplex. He’s got a couple projects going on up there already. Using a postcompiler here is a pretty cool idea, and Ruurd’s definitely making the EF sing and dance here.

1. PostSharp4EF: Automatically implement IPoco This project uses PostSharp to post-compile your assemblies. When it encounters a simple attribute, it will implement everything needed to use it in EF: Typelevel attributes, EDMscalar attributes, changetracking and default values. This means there are no runtime performance penalties. See Introducing EF Contrib post for more detailed information about this project.
2. Plug-in Edmx Code Generator: easily add assemblies that will hook into the codegeneration part of Entity Framework. Check this blog post out for more info!

Finally, our friends in the SQL Server Compact team have released an EF provider for their 3.5 Beta 1 release. This is wicked cool.

Yesterday Microsoft announced a new student software program that will provide no-cost access to the most recent Microsoft Developer technologies and tools, including Visual Studio and the associated .NET Data technologies and tools, to College students around the world.

Currently the program is available to 11 countries including: Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The December CTP of ADO.NET Data Services (also known as Project Astoria) has been Released! You can download the CTP here as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions preview release.

 For more information on ADO.NET Data Services check out http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/default.aspx .

Elisa Flasko
Program Manager, Data Programmability