LINQ and DevForce

IdeaBlade Thanks for the reply... Looking forward to Ideablade's new stuff. 

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