Mehran Nikoo's Notes

"LINQ to Entities" and "ADO.NET Entity Framework"

If you are interested in the Entity Data Model and want to know more about Microsoft's Data Access strategy in Orcas and .NET Framework, then have a look at this great blog post published by our data access team over the weekend.

"LINQ to Entities" will supplement other LINQ extensions like "LINQ to SQL" and has great and useful features including but not limited to: mapping single class to multiple tables, modelling many to many relationships, working with relational stores other than SQL Server and sharing a single model across the Database Engine, Reporting Services, Analysis Services and Integration Services.

"LINQ to Entities" will be part of the ADO.NET Entity Framework, which is an extension to the Orcas version of .NET Framework and will ship after Orcas but in the first half of 2008.

Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta 1 Shipped

It consists of multiple releases: Visual Studio Professional Edition, Visual Studio Team Suite and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. You can choose between the ISO images (to install the software yourself - don't do this on a production machine) or the VPC images.

Well done to the team.

Go and get it!

Enterprise Library 3.0 Is Released

See Tom Hollander's post. You can download the "Enterprise Library 3.0" from here (requires registration).

The Enterprise Library has become a must have for the applications based on the .NET Framework. Within the last few years, I have seen most of the EntLib's features like Policy Injection, Support for multiple Configuration Environments (Environmental Overrides) and Validation being implemented in various projects so using EntLib 3.0 can massively reduce the development effort. The EntLib team have also resolved the strong-naming challenge by providing a Strong-Naming Guidance Package (requires GAX).