Sharing data among applications in a complex corporate IT environment is unfortunately often reduced to sharing a common database or in some cases a cube. .NET 4.0 introduces a lot of industrialization tools that make the idea of an application independent SOA data repository reachable. This article explores some of those tools, and how they help make SOA data services flexible and non-intrusive.
LightSpeed is a commercial ORM for .NET that boasts of several features such as Entity Serialization, a robust VS designer, built-in LINQ support, support for DTOs and more. We got in touch with John-Daniel Trask, co-founder of Mindscape (LightSpeed’s maker) to speak more about the product and ORMs in general.
Cloud service provider Tier 3 has released Iron Foundry, a .NET-friendly fork of VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service. Iron Foundry gives the sizeable number of .NET developers an open source alternative to Windows Azure and lets them participate in the increasingly popular Cloud Foundry ecosystem.
Microsoft has released the WCF Data Services October CTP, which targets .NET 4 and Silverlight 4. This update includes new libraries for OData version 3, and adds support for spatial data.
Solutions Design has released ORM Profiler, a tool meant to help improve data access layer performance. It tracks and logs ADO.NET calls so that developers can analyze their data access and discover potential problems.
The Dynamics CRM SDK, which allows Dynamics CRM to be customized using .NET framework, opens the entire object model to developers to build solutions against. It does this using reusable application services and a multi-tenant architecture and allows to build multiple Line-Of-Business xRM applications on a single platform.
Using the new DLR features in VB 10 and C# 4 you can build a configuration-free ORM that works well with legacy stored procedures. Though accessed using normal object-dot-property syntax, all the data objects are built at runtime based solely on the information returned by the database. And this is done with no interfaces to define, classes to implement, or data mapping definitions to write.
In this interview made by Sadek Drobi, Don Syme speaks about F# 2.0, its application fields, its integration in Visual Studio 2010 and F# open source Power Pack library. Don also discusses the genesis of F#, the ties with OCaml as well as its specificity. He explains how did OOP and FP mix into one language and mentions some of the language's design decisions and compromises he had to take.
In this interview Eric Nelson talks about what’s coming in VS 2010, the C# – VB.NET convergence, the introduction of Parallel as a library, and Azure cloud computing.
