Several years ago I was criticized for being too wary of exposing certain data access libs/versions from MS. I haven't changed my mind, quite the opposite. (I wouldn't be surprised if you can spontaneously mention seven different libs without thinking about different versions - assuming you work with MS tech...) The core of my applications/services of the last few years is oblivious to the data access libs. The infrastructure shouldn't affect or be found in the core at all!

Today I came across this blog post by Andres Aguiar:

The news are out - ADO.NET 3.0 Entity Framework

If anything it just makes me even more certain about how to deal with infrastructure. For the next framework version it seems as if we will have (at least?) the following to choose from when accessing data in a relational database:

  • Dlinq
  • EDM
  • And I guess the old DataSet stuff also

I can't say I'm against having several choices, but do we really need all those choices from a single vendor? Are they that different?

Though I'm not sure if we will see both Dlinq and EDM because Dlinq isn't mentioned at all here:

ADO.NET Tech Preview: Overview

On the other hand, EDM was totally new for me (whatever that means).

Is it just me or has this whole area been a bit messy within MS? I'm thinking about, for example, ObjectSpaces (a few incarnations), MBF, WinFS, the above... What will happen next? Stay tuned!

:-)

Update

OK, only two hours after my blog post went live, the second link above stopped working. The same goes for the picture and the links in Andres' blog post to the blog posts of the ADO.NET team. And the movie at Channel 9 about EDM is also gone. I'm sure we will soon know why.