March is a busy month for the ADO.NET Data Services team. They have announced details of version 1.5 which will ship before .NET 4.0 and they have released an alpha of the offline bits they talked about back in October. There is a blog post to accompany this release and for me the following was interesting:
Q: Is this technology going to be present in the next version of ADO.NET Data Services and/or Visual Studio?
A: No. We are working on two fronts. One is the enhancements we want to make to the ADO.NET Data Services framework in the next release. The other is about long-term direction and exploration. Project Codename "Astoria Offline" falls into the second category
Hence – a technology to look at, but not one to take any kind of dependency on.
We certainly are very active in the world of data currently. As Pablo summarises:
the preview release of an exploration project we have been calling "Astoria Offline". This project sits at the intersection between Data Services, Sync Framework, SQL Express/Compact and the Entity Framework.