Mike Flasko announced over the weekend on The Project Astoria Team Blog that the timeframe for the ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP1 to be released “should be in the coming months”. So what are they adding Details were not too specific as you might have guessed, but Mike did mention that the feature set is going to be closed very soon. This usually means that the a CTP release is not far behind.
Mike also explains the versioning and how it will be released. He says that v1.5 will be a standalone release with a superset of the functionality from v1.0. The standalone release means that you can have both v1.0 and v1.5 installed without running into each other. This is an interesting point as it gives you the option of building against either version on the same PC.
Some of the highlights of the features of v1.5 are:
- Data Binding
- Mike says that the client libraries will be extended to support 2 way data binding for XAML applications (Silverlight and WPF). No details were given, but I assume this means that there will be improved support for saving changes from target to source (without having to use handlers and update the context). I could be very likely wrong here though. Either way, I am excited about any new data features :)
- Row Count
- The ability to request a row count to get the number of records found instead of having to actually retrieve all of the records just to determine row count. Small feature that can have a huge impact, obviously.
- Enhanced BLOB support
- Server Driven Paging
- Feed Customization
- Data Service Provider Interface for Custom Provider Writers
- Bug Fixes
Taking a step back and looking at the big picture, I think this is a really nice step forward for Astoria. Many technologies don’t make it through multiple revisions. So just the fact that it has a revision coming is good news for its future. Beyond that, the features in Astoria make it ideal for Silverlight applications (my favorite of course). Its great to see Astoria moving forward and adding more features. The big ones I hope for are:
- Secure cross domain support between Silverlight and Astoria services
- Additional features for business logic in addition to interceptors to support more business rules and server validation logic
- Improved error message communication between Astoria and Silverlight. (This will also help when using authentication with Astoria and Silverlight.)
- Ability to either auto generate the property changed partial methods for entities on the client or to somehow eliminate the need for them by making some inclusive handler.
