ADO.Next and the Entity Framework
Last month, a document describing ADO.Next was published and quickly pulled. A new version was just posted to http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/. I read the original document, but neglected to save a copy of it before it was pulled. Skimming over the new ADO.Next document and the ADO Entity Framework documents, that were posted on 6/15, I see that there appear to have been a number of significant changes made in the last month. I hope to read through them more thoroughly in the near future and comment on them at that point. At least this time, I remembered to save and print the documents.
From the looks of things, the new documents look much more promising and allude to some new tool sets to make mapping relational data structures to object heirarchies much easier. One tool appears to be similar to the BizTalk mapper (including the functoids) to create XML based mapping between the tables and objects. They also appear to be extending the DLINQ designer to allow for virtual views, or objects which are based on multiple data structures. Both of these are good things in my opinion and may help us move more easily from the table centric mindsets typical of people who see the simple demos and think that they are indicative of the kinds of applications we should build in real-life.