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LINQ and DevForce
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WildHog View Drop Down
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Joined: 03-Aug-2007
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Posts: 9 		Post Options Post Options   Quote WildHog Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: LINQ and DevForce
    Posted: 03-Aug-2007 at 6:59pm
It appears on cursory reading that LINQ will duplicate and extend a number of features offered in DevForce.  It appears to have ORM, Concurrency management, Object Graph tracking, standard Query constructs, etc. ... http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb425822.aspx
 
Anders Hejlsberg seems to suggest LINQ will be a transformative change in programming.  ORCAS will be RTM probable by the end of the year.  How extensively or deeply will DevForce integrate LINQ?
 
Perhaps, this could be answered along with questions of depth of integration of other nascent Microsoft technologies...WCF (which Juval Lowy feels is..."simply the next development platform...") and WF.
 
A DevForce Roadmap would be interesting to hear what IdeaBlade has in store.  In particular, though, I am most interested in near term plans for LINQ.


Edited by WildHog - 03-Aug-2007 at 7:22pm
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pnschofield View Drop Down
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Posts: 18 		Post Options Post Options   Quote pnschofield Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 02-Nov-2007 at 9:23am


DevForce includes a number of technologies, some of which have parallels in the new ADO.NET technologies, and some not.

DevForce 's OQL is analogous to LINQ.  However, IdeaBlade will be replacing their OQL with LINQ in a future release, so a LINQ query written against DevForce will look the same as a LINQ query written against LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, etc.  This is the exciting part for DevForce developers, IMHO, and also part of Microsoft's vision.  LINQ isn't about replacing someone else's technology with theirs, it's about querying any data source in the same way.

IdeaBlade's object/relational mapping and entity generation are roughly analogous to the LINQ to SQL or the more powerful ADO.NET Entity Framework.  EF may have some more flexible inheritance and mapping support, such as designer support for entities that denormalize the database design, map a table to a hierarchy of classes, etc.  EF also has better many-to-many support, IMHO.   I'm interested in hearing Ward Bell's take on this, and what kinds of new mapping features we'll see in future DevForce releases.

IdeaBlade's client-side caching support:  the ADO.NET Entity Framework only seems to have partial implementation of this.  So far, I haven't seen how you can perform cache-only queries without some hackish LINQ code.

IdeaBlade's Business Object Server does not seem to have a parallel in the ADO.NET space.  Microsoft is still working on their N-tier story for LINQ.  The Astoria project may offer a few of these features, but so far, they do not have plans to support ad-hoc querying out of the box.  I think for enterprises, the BOS is where DevForce offers a lot of value.  Writing your own service layer is a substantial undertaking, and you'll never write anything as robust and powerful as the BOS.


Edited by pnschofield - 02-Nov-2007 at 9:25am
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IdeaBlade View Drop Down
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Posts: 353 		Post Options Post Options   Quote IdeaBlade Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Nov-2007 at 8:06am
Paul's comments are remarkably perceptive. The forum is not the place where we talk about our roadmap and I don't think I'll break precendent here. We are working on our next version which brings today's DevForce value-add to LINQ, EntityFramework, and WPF. We will be providing more information about this in the next few weeks.  Stay tuned!

 



Edited by IdeaBlade - 05-Nov-2007 at 8:07am
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WildHog View Drop Down
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Posts: 9 		Post Options Post Options   Quote WildHog Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 12-Nov-2007 at 10:15am
IdeaBlade
Thanks for the reply... Looking forward to Ideablade's new stuff. 
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