Personally I really am starting to hate the whole silverlight technology. The first version was crap because you had to be some guru to be able to program something fancy looking and now the second version is out and the tools are crap. So what’s next crappy visual studio .net 2010 all together? I really would like the guys at MS to take it a bit slower so they can increase the quality of their products.
On the Mix 07 website you can download the session that introduced the Astoria project. It was presented by Pablo Castro. The nice thing is that you can view as a Silverlight plugin, download the WMV or if you have a Zune download on there.
I was reading through my feeds when I found a post of Bart De Smet that summed up some of the newly announced “stuff” at Mix 07 .
One announcement in particular caught my eye it was the project codenamed Astoria . Astoria is a technology that will expose a data store through an ADO.NET Entity model using HTTP as transport technology.
It’s called a data service which can be consumed by web clients. The advantage is the HTTP protocol that is being used. This means that everywhere where you can access the internet you can also access the data service. It will pass through proxies, firewalls and so on…
Another nice thing about it is that Astoria not only allows “Read” functionality using the HTTP GET verb, but also “Create” using HTTP POST, “Update” using HTTP PUT and finally “Delete” using HTTP DELETE.
There are 3 formats in which the data is being sent over the wire:
- XML
- RDF & XML
-JSON
The main target groups are the “new” web technologies, like SilverLight & AJAX, but you can also use it in regular desktop applications. All you need is an internet connection.
Currently they released a first CTP that is meant to give you an idea on how they see the concept of Data Services. You can download it already at the site http://astoria.mslivelabs.com . There are some other downloads as well as an online service that demos the technology in a limited form (only reading is possible).
