posted on Thursday, August 17, 2006 3:07 AM
by
roydictus
Object-Relational Mapping with ADO.NET vNext
Microsoft has just released the August 2006 CTP (Community Technology Preview) version of the next version of ADO.NET. The most important new feature of ADO.NET vNext is/will be an Entity Framework which supports Object-Relational Mapping straight from ADO.NET. Does this mean typed DataSets will be a thing of the past soon? It's too early to tell, but they are surely going to be used far less in the architectures of 2007 and later...
What's also cool about it is that this Entity Framework integrates with LINQ, so you can run LINQ queries on Entity collections etc. Whenever you make a modification to an Entity object, it is marked "dirty" so that when changes to lists, collections and graphs are saved, only the dirty ones are actually saved, and then their status is restored to "clean" again. It's great to have that as part of the Framework -- I've been doing stuff like this using ReSharper templates and Visual Studio 2005 snippets, and now it's becoming standard behavior without requiring any custom coding. You can even split Entity objects over multiple tables -- so that certain properties of your entity are saved in one table and other properties in another table. It's reminiscent of Commerce Server's data aggregator.
Get it while it's hot!