Microsoft is working on a project called Astoria. It consists partly of a new technology acompanied with a library and partly of a free service. It's a data service that is reachable over regular HTTP requests and standard HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. The data is formatted as plain XML, JSON or RDF (experimental). The service that is acompanied is a hosting service for this data service. You will get a 100 MB data service hosting for free. The Astoria runtime library makes use of the ADO.NET Entity Framework part of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 and is built on top of Windows Communication Foundation. I'm very interested in this new technology. I might try it sometime in the future. But we have to remember this service is experimental. It might even cease to exist some day.

• Project Astoria Team Blog
• Astoria Online Service
• Astoria Online Service - Getting Started
• Sample Northwind Astoria Service - Customers in London Query
• Astoria Documentation

I was looking at the oncoming podcasts from .NET Rocks and saw a podcast about NServiceBus coming at August 14. I was immediately triggered about Services Bus, in the context of Enterprise Service Bus. I don't think about using it, but more about learning how it works. I understood the basic solution makes use of MSMQ but someone else was able to add a filebased transport for NServiceBus. Udi Dahan is the owner of the NServiceBus project, it is in heavy development. You can download the source from Udi's site and take a look at it. At least we have the ability to listen to Udi on the August 14 on .NET Rocks.

Microsoft published a white paper about Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. I read it and discuss it in a brief summary. The white paper discuss the different customer experiences that Visual Studio 2008 delivers through seven different technology areas.

1. Develop Smart Client Applications
2. Create Microsoft Office Applications
3. Build Windows Vista Applications
4. Handle Data More Productive
5. An Improved Developer Experience Overall
6. Enable New Web Experiences
7. Improve Application Life-cycle Management (ALM)

1: Develop Smart Client Applications

The ClickOnce application deployment is improved. Firefox is supported as a browser, very nice and necessary for ClickOnce becoming successful.

Something I'm not really sure about. Office 2007 UI support for native C++ applications. Those native applications can make use of the Ribbon Bar, Ribbon Status Bar and Mini-toolbar. But why only support native C++ applications? We want this feature for managed C# applications, don't we?

Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET provides an API to synchronize between data services and the local data store. This could be nice, but I hope it's solid. In the past I sadly met Microsoft Access Replication, something comparable to the basics I think. I'll never suggest a company to use Microsoft Access Replication. But ADO.NET Synchronization Services might work, I guess we will have to wait for Real World Experience on this.

2: Create Microsoft Office Applications

No comments yet, maybe later.

3: Build Windows Vista Applications

Visual Studio now provides tools for Windows Presentation Foundation. We can now use a designer to create our user interface, in the past we needed to use Microsoft Expression Blend.

4: Handle Data More Productive

Also new is the Language Integrated Query (LINQ). It supports querying for objects, databases and XML. And if I'm right LINQ 2 SQL is some sort of ORM tool. I try to look more into this in the future.

5: An Improved Developer Experience Overall

You have the ability to target different .NET Framework platforms while making use of Visual Studio 2008. Very nice, I'm not sure how far this goes. Are you able to build against the .NET Framework 1.1 but are you able to make use of IntelliSense trough the other platforms? Are you able to make use of designers for the .NET Framework 1.1? Don't think so, but I have to check first.

6: Enable New Web Experiences

The new web experiences consists of the integration of a new version of AJAX ASP.NET and the integration of Windows Live Services. Besides this it should be easier to consume a Windows Communication Foundation service.

7: Improve Application Life-cycle Management (ALM)

The most interesting thing is the enhanced Visual Studio Unit Testing. The performance is improved, but I'm interested to see if it is extendable and be used better in conjunction with Mocking frameworks.

SOA in the Real World is a book that introduces a set of SOA capabilities and explores them. You can download this book for free from the Microsoft site. I think this is the ideal time for me to get to know SOA better and how it can be applied in the Real World.

I just found a blog post from Nicholas Allen about some Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Case Studies. He tells us the Case Studies about WCF aren't easily found through the Microsoft Website so he didicates a post about it. I try to find some time to read a few of those Case Studies. This can be part of my study around .NET 3.0 and specially the WCF part.