Chatting about LINQ and ADO.NET Entities

great video

Really great video...... The deeper dives like the white boarding done here are great.... as a dev I personally really want to know whats going on under there as much as I can.... plus it really helps get a better understanding of exactly what it is I am asking to be done

I would love to just sit and listen to Anders speak about the architecture for hours lol .....

Always like talks with Anders!  One small thing... he was interrupted too much IMO.  I would ask question and let him roll.  This was a bit short also.  I think they had more material.

As a side note, the May CTP is good, but still a bit buggy with Intellisence, so can't keep it installed for normal dev.  Look forward to next release however.  Cheers.

This technology is going to change the way we write SQL and anlyze objects.. can't wait until it becomes mainstream.

staceyw wrote:

As a side note, the May CTP is good, but still a bit buggy with Intellisence, so can't keep it installed for normal dev.  Look forward to next release however.  Cheers.

That's just the IDE integration; you can always just compile from msbuild (msbuild foo.sln, msbuild foo.csproj, etc).  I'll understand if, like me, you're addicted to the IDE

I posted a review of this video on my blog. Here is the entry:

Last Friday a Channel9 video appeared with Anders Hejlsberg and Sam Drucker talking about LINQ and Entities. They talk about raising the level of abstraction for programmers when programming against data. Anders makes a very good point at 6m42s that LINQ adds a level of abstraction without taking away capabilities at the bottom level (like writing your own SQL query). The loss of capabilities at the bottom often happens when the level of abstraction is being raised. Anders says: “We are very conscious of not sliding the spectrum up but growing the capabilities.”

At the end of the video (at 21m58s) we get a glimpse into the reason behind the retraction of the MSDN Article called Next-Generation Data Access: Making the Conceptual Level Real which was also about this subject. Microsoft was working on two parallel tracks (ADO.NET vNext and LINQ) on different teams and is now struggling with realigning those efforts.

The Entity concept will be part of the next version of ADO.NET. Note that I no longer call this future version ADO.NET 3.0, since this might cause confusion with the version number of the next version of the .NET Framework itself. LINQ and ADO.NET vNext will NOT be included in the .NET Framework 3.0. Instead .NET 3.0 will contain ADO.NET 2.0. Confusing isn’t it?

Very nice video! As you guys mentioned earlier the whiteboard explanation really puts the idea of linq into perspective.

Keith J. Farmer wrote:



staceyw wrote: As a side note, the May CTP is good, but still a bit buggy with Intellisence, so can't keep it installed for normal dev.  Look forward to next release however.  Cheers.

That's just the IDE integration; you can always just compile from msbuild (msbuild foo.sln, msbuild foo.csproj, etc).  I'll understand if, like me, you're addicted to the IDE

  Unfortunately for me, I am addicted to the IDE and Intellisense.  Very nice work so far.  Entities sounds really interesting and helpful.  Sounds a bit like Views, not sure.

BTW.  It struck me today while futzing with the Datagridview, that the event model for validation and formatting is a lot of work.  It would seem a better model (or additional model) would be to use attributes on the properties (i.e. declaritive model) applied to the properties of the row object.  This is not totally related to Linq, but has some cross-over because the attributes could be applied to the linq objects/properties.  So you could have a "Validate" attribute for range validation (similar to cmdlets) and "Format" attributes, Validation/Error Text, Help text, and/or other - ideas?  These will be recognized across the framework controls.  So things like the Datagridview could just "pick" them up and do the right thing for validation and formatting without any need to set events and do it manually.  So it is almost like DB column constraints, but applied at the object/property level.  There seems to be potential in that area. 

Nice video. Anders gives such lucid explanantions.
The only issue I have with this video is that it was way too compressed. The writing on the whiteboard was quite difficult to make out.

I'm interested about the performance of ADO.NET entities. Will it be clever enough to optimise its SQL (table joins, indexes etc.), not bring back every row (but not ask for each row at a time) and so forth?

For the most simple 3 tier applications, with very basic < 10 table databases these type of middleware/business layers work very well. For complex databases they are generally slow and bulky and not worth using in my experience.

I have been evaluating report modeler from Reporting Services for the last week and it has a bunch of great ideas with it which I am guesing is the start of the ADO.NET Entity Framework (v3/vNext).  The biggest weakness that I saw imediately in the report modeler was its enterprise capablities (mulitple databases, multiple database platforms - I don't count views and linked servers as a practical way to build an enterprise model)

I hope that they make it so the that the entities have there own data source and then create roles in between those entities. 

Also, more control over the autogeneration would be nice such as the ablity to "lock" the schema of a data object (i.e. entity, role, attribute) 

Oh yeah, I also hope Linq and ADO.NET Entities get on the same page.

How would one confront to "classic" OR mapping like hibernate/ejb3 and LINQ? Can a OR mapping layer be built on top of it and is IQueryable the gate to it? Are we going to see also some batch operations stuff, db management etc?....
I should have waited until the end. Nice stuff, I hope to see more on this.

Very important video... if anyone is interested I have a little summary here

Alex

Now we've got LINQ to SQL, to DataSets and an entirely new thing called entities. That all sounds interresting, but confusing too. I'd really like to know what Microsofts take on O/R mapping is. How will we create persistable business objects in the future? Will the border between data and functionalty be removed as in other O/R mappers, or will we continue to use 3rd party tools if we want this kind of developer experience?

Will future 3rd party ORMs be able to build on the Entity functionality? Or on the provider model that comes with it?

Things have been announced and dropped. We all remember ObjectSpaces, the talk about WinFS providing ORM features, and lately it seemed that DLinq would provide at least basic ORM capabilities in addition to querying. Now, entities seem to offer an abstraction that makes good sense within ORM as well. Several comments suggest that some people at MS don't seem to think too high of ORMs anyway, so - what's the story?

I'm not just wondering. Knowing what you are planning to do would help us finally making some overdue decisions about our own architecture. (I should add that I'm aware that things may change, I'd still be happy to learn where you are expecting to go.)

Give us the big picture!

Hello,

This is now linked from the Linq section of WinFXGuide.com.

Best,

Fran

how can i join to chatting with u ?

 it's very nice video but not completely