ADO.NET vNext Future Directions 2
Also see the first part ADO.NET vNext Future Directions of this series of posts on the next-generation data access for the .NET platform.
Syntax sugar for Store Schema (SSDL) is a solution for the ambiguity I mentioned in my ADO.NET Entity Framework Metadata post [discussion]. Both the store SSDL and CSDL schema's are based on the entity data model terms. The team is currently looking at providing syntactic sugar for declaring tables and databases in more direct terms.
Extensibility interfaces allow replacement of certain pieces of the system [discussion]. The team is talking about opening a hook for developers to intercept the update processing.
Specifications for CSDL, SSDL, MSL to provide guidance with the ADO.NET Entity Framework Metadata [discussion]. For now you can look at the .xsd files that are used internally to validate the files at design and runtime.
See C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas\
- CodeGenerationSchema.xsd
- CSDLSchema.xsd
- CSDLSchemaTypes.xsd
- csmsl.xsd
- DMSchemaTypes.xsd
- EDMSchemaTypes.xsd
- SSDLSchema.xsd
- SSDLSchemaTypes.xsd
Disconnected entities would be useful for several scenarios, including multi-tier systems where you need to transfer entities and receive modified entities, and the ASP.NET scenarios where you need to re-construct your state between page hits [discussion]. Another scenario is a rich-client that only occasionally connects to the server. We already did this in Neo with a powerful implementation of the unit of work pattern. One of the features of the Neo ObjectContext is that it does not need a connection to the database. It can even start out connected, with features like lazy-loading enabled, and later on disconnect so that all queries run against the data available in memory only. of course, changes can still be saved to the database.
Integration with ObjectDataSource to provide middle-tier data retrieval and update capabilities [discussion].