I stumbled onto this today while doing my daily rounds of the .NET sites. Microsoft has a new product that just released a CTP called "Astoria".
Here is a description from the "Astoria" website :
"Astoria is a project in the Data Programmability team at Microsoft that explores how to provide infrastructure and tools for exposing and consuming data in the web. Astoria can create data services that are exposed in a natural way to the web, over HTTP and using URIs to refer to pieces of data; these data services can be consumed by AJAX front-ends, Silverlight-enabled web pages, desktop applications and more. At this time we’re making available two experimental elements of project Astoria: the Microsoft Codename Astoria toolkit and the Microsoft Codename Astoria online service."
From what I can gather this technology will really fit well with SOA by exposing the data as a service. In addition it seems like this will help make consuming data through AJAX easier. You could essentially create the data service for your customer data for example and have it available to all your WebApps and desktop apps in your organization. This way with all your apps your not essentially creating a data access layer for each app, instead you would just consume this data service.
Check out the Project Astoria Team blog
here
Also check out a
sandbox they've created to showcase the technology as well as let you create your own data services to play with. The encarta sample is kind of cool and gives a good example of how your could use this technology.
When i finally get around to it and create a .NET 3.0/3.5 sandbox for myself, i'll certainly give this a try.
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