Highlights of “Data Programming and Modeling for the Microsoft .NET Developer”

I’m having great fun watching the Microsoft PDC 2009 session videos, and blogging the highlights for future reference. In case you want to jump into the video, I’ve included some time-checks in brackets (0:00). Read the rest of the series here.

Don Box and Chris Anderson gave a very watchable presentation, Data Programming and Modeling for the Microsoft .NET Developer. This is an overview of how we .Net developers have done data access in the past, and how we will be doing it the future.

Chris Anderson started with a reminder of the dark ages of data access in .Net, SqlConnection and IDataReader (3:40). Then he showed how an Entity Framework data model could be layered on top of the database. Entity Framework provides something called an EntityConnection which works like SqlConnection, but in terms of the entities in your model, not data base tables. You can write queries in something called EntitySql, which allows you to “.” your way though object relationships without using joins (see 7:48). Most often though, Entities are accessed using the ObjectContext, which gives strongly-typed access to the entities and permits LINQ queries over them (11:18).

Attention then turned to the way we define our databases and models. Traditionally we would start with the database, and build an Entity Framework model on top of it. As from Entity Framework v4 we will be able to define the model first, and have Entity Framework generate the database from it (14:20). But we can go further than this. Using a CTP of an API that will be released after .Net 4, it’s possible to define a model entirely in code using Plain-Old-CLR-Objects (POCO), and then generate a database from this (19:44). But which approach is best. Chris provided this helpful slide:

Don Box then took over (33:40) to talk about the OData Protocol. This is a new name for the protocol used by ADO.Net Data Services (formerly known as Astoria). It is based on the Atom publishing format and it provides Rest-based access to data. As well as supporting querying (sorting, filtering, projection, etc.) it also supports updates to the data.

Don demoed how Sharepoint 2010 supports this format (37:35). He showed how it makes use of the Entity Data model to provide meta-data about the structure of the data (39:00). Excel 2010 has support for querying data in this format (39:40). Naturally .Net applications can query this kind of data (40:45), but there is also an API that makes it easy to write services that provide data in this format (45:00). According to Don, "OData is the new ODBC”!

In the last ten minutes, Don talked about the connection that all this has with the “M” language – how M can be used to create the Entity Model for example.