“Astoria” - Data Services For ASP.Net Ajax and Silver light

A new framework to make it easy for use to build data services to make it easy for developers to get data for a rich web client using ASP.Net Ajax and Silverlight, Microsoft Codename “Astoria”.By using URL’s we can simply get data from our data source, for example let assume we want to get an Order entity, we can simply write:http://webserver/data.svc/OrdersIf we want to get an specific Order we can write: http://webserver/data.svc/Orders[Pizza] There are several things we can do, like sorting, using “property path” to get child entities, we can use paging etc.Currently Astoria can represent data in plain XML, JSON and in a subset of RDF and XML.For example if we get the data as XML it could look like: <DataService xml:base=”http://myserver/data.svc”>         <Orders>                    <Order uri=”Orders[Pizza]“>                                   <OrderID>1</OrderID>                                      <ShopName>Domino</ShopName>                                      <ContactName>Johnson</ContactName>                                       <ContactTitle>Sales Manager</ContactTitle>                                       <Address>#15, Kakkanji Street, Gandhi Nagar</Address>                                        <City>Chennai</City>                                        <Region>Tamil Nadu</Region>                                       <PostalCode>600072</PostalCode>                                       <Country>India</Country>                                         <Phone>91-044-220074321</Phone>                                        <Fax>91-044-220074321</Fax>                                        <OrderDetails href=”Order[Pizza]/OrderDetails” mce_href=”Order[Pizza]/OrderDetails” />                      </Order>          </Orders> </DataService>   Astoria uses the ADO.NET Entity Framework. With the Entity Framework we could use EDM schemas and map our entities against a relational data source.

Update:

Here’s the description from the Astoria Project Site (where you can get the CTP today): http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/.

Description:

“The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the Internet. The data service is reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON. “

Here’s a great video by Pablo Castora: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=306736#306736