Mark Pollack provides an introduction to Spring.NET which can help developers more easily implement and design loosely coupled application architectures. The core concepts in the Spring Framework extend beyond the Java platform and are applicable to .NET. Spring.NET combines the Spring Framework's proven architectural concepts and patterns with additional features specific to .NET.
Denali will be the final edition of SQL Server to support OLE DB, because Microsoft considers ODBC to be the industry standard for relational data access.
IBM is offering a demo of their DB2 Add-ins for Visual Studio 2010. In addition to "full end to end debugging for SQL procedures for VB and C# apps”, it includes ADO.NET and Entity Framework providers for many of the DB2 variants.
A new version of the Spring.NET framework, version 1.3, was recently released. InfoQ spoke with Mark Pollack, founder and lead of the Spring.NET project, to learn more about this release and what new capabilities it brings, and also to learn more about the new Spring Integration.NET project.
Microsoft announced System.Data.OracleClient will be marked obsolete in .NET 4.0 and removed from future releases. OracleClient is the ADO.NET provider for Oracle developed by Microsoft and shipped as part of the .NET FCL. Its absence will be an impediment to future upgrades for the many small projects using this provider for Oracle data access.
The .NET RIA Services team has published their release plan starting with a CTP in July and ending with RTW during the first part of 2010. These dates are not set in concrete since changes may appear due to user feedback.
Entity Framework 4.0 Beta 1 – aka EF V2 - delivered with .NET 4.0 Beta 1 contains a list of important improvements: Customization of Code Generation, Lazy Loading, N-tier Support, POCO Support, DDL Generation, Query Customization and others.
Nigel Ellis, Architect at Microsoft, presented today a detailed overview of the new relational model of Azure SQL Data Service, which was announced a couple of weeks ago on the team's blog. Nigel also demonstrated how SDS could be used by WordPress (a PHP application) via an ODBC driver.
ADO.NET Data Services, previously known as Project Astoria, will receive offline capabilities in the near future. That means applications could be developed to synchronize their data, then use it in an offline fashion.
