Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework Beta 2 available on Wednesday

Edgar Sánchez — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:31:27 GMT

This blog has been abandoned for the longest time :-$ but I’ve got great news to try and re-inaugurate it (again): it’s just been announced that beta 2 for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will be available the day after tomorrow, i.e. on October 21st; moreover, we now have a firm date for the launch of the final versions of these products: March 22nd 2010. There is a lot of cool stuff in the new versions of Visual Studio and .NET Framework but my personal favorites (at least for the time being :-) are:

The inclusion of dynamic programming elements in C# and other framework languages. Good things from languages like Python, Groovy, or Ruby are now an integral part of C#.
The inclusion of F# as a first level language of the .NET Framework, welcome functional programming to the most popular commercial development platform on the planet!
A new version of Entity Framework, making the oficial .NET ORM tool more flexible and adequate. Less and less, we’ll need to code SQL by hand and laboriously move data from tables to objects and viceversa.

As I said, there’s a lot of cool stuff in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, but I plan to start using those three things as soon as possible in customer projects, after all, to have success stories by March 2010, we have to start working before this year ends.

Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL and Oracle

Edgar Sánchez — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:24:23 GMT

Amid the debate about which is better and have more future (two things that not necessarily go together) between LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework, one thing they have in common is the fact that Oracle is in “no comment” mode about both of them. It’s like Oracle would be expecting that the lack of its “official” provider for Entity Framework, let alone LINQ to SQL, would somehow move people to develop in Java instead of .NET Framework. IMHO, Visual Studio 2008 is so productive that people may first consider moving from Oracle to SQL Server before moving from VS 2008 to JDeveloper.

Luckily, .NET Framework has a big ecosystem of developers and ISV’s: enter Devart, a software house in Russia or Ukraine –I’m not sure. They’ve been offering for a while now an Entity Framework provider for Oracle, I have had the chance to use it with Oracle 10g with good success. The good news is that a few days ago they released new versions of all of its providers (changing their names while at it), including dotConnect for Oracle 5.00. Even more intriguing, this new version includes a LINQ to SQL provider for Oracle, something supposedly so complex to do that it would have taken a long time before it even existed. To be fair, I haven’t already used this last provider, but the very fact that it’s available is exciting. Now Oracle friendly Visual Studio 2008 developers (no, that’s not an oxymoron at all) has two good paths to follow. Let the debate begin!

.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level : Entity Framework

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework Beta 2 available on Wednesday

Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL and Oracle