ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Channel 9)

In this interview Saaid Kahn, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team, shows us how to create an n-tier application against a database using ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) and an Entity Data Model, both now available in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.

ADO.NET Data Services use WCF REST-ful services and provides all the plumbing so you can focus on the program logic by programming against a service proxy. ADO.NET Data Services allow you to easily create data services exposed on the web using URIs to point to pieces of data and simple, well-known formats to represent that data.

Saaid shows us how to create a simple service and then consume it using a Windows client via the "Add Service Reference" dialog in Visual Studio. He also walks through the client proxy methods that work with the data service.

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

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vesuvius Count Orlock

Oct 24, 2008 at 1:11 AM

I have watched all your videos on data, and this one seems the most "unfinished" IMHO. I still don't see EF as anywhere near finished, and being something one could decide to use on a million dollar project, especially if you know WCF.

This just seems to me an abstraction layer on top of WCF for people that don't or cannot learn WCF, that want all the "magic" to happen in the designer.

I will have a look again at EF in Visual Studio 10.
prasannap

Oct 26, 2008 at 5:32 PM

1. Not sure, where in this DEMO you mentioned about Entity Framework, I have no-idea what you were trying to Demo

2. When you do a Demo like this, it would be great if you cna do a White Board with a small diagram about what you are going to Demo (Bth, this is something your team can suggest to all presenters). Picture speaks 1000 words

3. Saaid Kahn - I personally believe you could have slowed down a little with your Demo Speech, I could barely catch some of the words what you said (sorry, no offense we all are learning )

4. My 2 cents - Write down in a small piece of paper (or 3x4 Index cards) in what exactly you are going to Demo & go step-by-step, that will make things easy to understand.
Smacker

Nov 18, 2008 at 2:29 PM

This was more of an intro to show that you don't need to do much coding to create a web service to access relational data.

I have just started using this technology mostly because I want to move toward web services. I played with web services in the past trying to serialize data for client side Javascript (JSON), which was difficult at best (it was easier to code it by hand). This seems useful in that you can create a diagram (edmx ADO.NET Entity Data Model) to represent your tables and relations, point this web service to it (svc ADO.NET Data Service), and bingo, instant serialized access to all the data.

Then, you can use Atlas (Microsoft Ajax) to do CRUD (create retrieve update and delete) operations within Javascript at the client browser without knowing a lot of what you are doing. Of course, if you get to this point, you probably know how to do these things anyway. This means you can create a Javascript variable, point it to the database "context" (or in this video, the "service:"), and have array access to records and object access to fields.

It's pretty cool stuff when you don't want all the details of coding, but isn't that the point of abstracting these technologies anyway?