A few days ago I wrote
about trying out Astoria. Yesterday I started trying out. First I thought about using Astoria local, but that wasn't succesful. On the
Astoria Getting Started Guide it says you need to have Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1 in combination with Astoria. In my case I already have Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, which in case
doesn't have ADO.NET Entity Framework available. And as a matter of fact Astoria is built on top of WCF and makes use of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. But that's no problem for setting up your own Astoria Data Service. Below are the detailed steps I took.
First of all I designed my rough model in Visio. Using the central entity
Task and all the other things around
Task like:
Project,
Context,
Priority and
User. The model is designed with Getting Things Done in my mind. A
topic I blogged about some time ago. This tryout wasn't about building a complex model, it was all about getting started with Astoria.
So let's translate this model in ADO.NET Entity Model. One thing before you start: I've had some trouble because the setting up of the model took me some time, and I wasn't able to complete because of some small error in the Session. Fast setting up does work though. First you need to set up some basic settings about your Data Service you're setting up. After this you need to create the entities, properties on those entities and all the assocications. Take a look at the images on the bottom for the way I translated the entity model to Astoria.
After this I just completed the service. Next time I'm going to use the Getting Things Done Data Service to read and write data. Do you think this is an interesting service? At least, I do.
