Dear Reader,
It’s a great time to be working with data. As we take stock of how our customers use information today, we see data being pulled from the Web, our desktops, departmental, workgroup and enterprise servers, and then surfacing in all kinds of different form factors. The sheer quantity of data available in systems is already mind-boggling and growing at a tremendous rate. At Microsoft, especially in the Data Programmability team, we are ridiculously excited to be working at the center of this storm. The authors of these articles will show you new innovations and best practices across the spectrum. These experts will show you new techniques and components for handling the myriad data shapes, locations, and sources that developers deal with on a regular basis. This edition of CoDe Focus offers us the opportunity to tell the story of our vision for the data platform as it stands today and in the near future. Of course it doesn’t stop there. Your thoughts, critical feedback, and participation in Community Technology Previews will help us all realize that vision.
“Data everywhere, usable by anyone at any time.”-That’s our grand mission: provide the best programming patterns, infrastructure, and tools for developing data-driven applications for Windows, .NET, and Microsoft SQL Server.
I invite you to take a walk with us across the techniques, tools, and components in this issue. We’ll be looking at our native data access technologies where we continue to innovate in raw speed and power to ensure the fattest and fastest pipe to databases via ODBC. We’ll show you some of the innovation we have been doing in XML Tools to support building applications that manipulate and store XML and work with schemas via XSD. We’ll dive into the .NET Framework where we have a bucket full of great stuff. Language Integrated Query (LINQ) offers a huge step forward in writing understandable and approachable queries of all sorts in programming languages. We’ll tour LINQ solutions for XML, SQL, Entities, and DataSet. Data access APIs are not a complete panacea, of course, and we’ve got a big down payment for model-driven development with data. We are super excited to announce the release of the ADO.NET Entity Framework and the foundational Entity Data Model, which drives a set of core data programming experiences now and into the future. We are pleased to show the Entity Designer that provides an exciting developer experience for creating conceptual models in the EDM that can be used directly with the ADO.NET Entity Framework.
As Web application technologies evolve, the work we are doing evolves as well; this includes areas we are currently working in such as ADO.NET Data Services and tier splitting.
Two trends stand out as harbingers of radical change: the proliferation of mobile computing devices and near-ubiquitous wireless network connectivity. Together they open up a world of possibilities for new applications. The one-two combo we’ll show you with the new release of SQL Server Compact and Microsoft Sync Framework can unshackle your applications from the desktop office and get your customers dancing in the aisles.
To get involved, try stuff out, and to learn more, come visit us on the Web at http://msdn.com/data and then join the conversations starting from http://blogs.msdn.com/data.
So let’s take that stroll-if you’re ready!
Sincerely,
Samuel Druker
General Manager, Data Programmability
Microsoft Corporation
http://msdn.com/data
