News
Microsoft Moves DBMS Into the VS Developer Mainstream
- By Lee Thé
- March 28, 2007
The second morning keynote at VSLive! San Francisco 2007 was delivered by Britt
Johnston, director for data programmability within Microsoft's Database and
Storage Platforms Group. Titled "The Last and Next Decade in Data Management
with the Microsoft Data Platform," the presentation gave the audience a
sneak preview of data management capabilities provided by the next version of
Visual Studio (VS), code-named "Orcas." Some capabilities scheduled
for even later versions were also demonstrated.
Johnston's prime focus was his group's effort to morph database management
programming from an arcane specialty completed "over there somewhere"
into tasks that can be completed with familiar VS tools.
Johnston outlined a vision of conceptual data programming that spanned product
lines and the realms of programmers, system administrators, and report authors.
Johnston and his team are working to make it easier to map business concepts
to data, make services consistent across different information sources, make
storage models consistent, and make it easier to extend legacy investments.
These improvements are designed to help you create artifacts that can be easily
shared.
He described Microsoft's vision for accomplishing this as moving from "database"
to "data platform" based on four pillars: entities, SQL Server, rich
services, and VS. Entities take the focus from tables and rows to business concepts.
SQL Server's evolution from CE to EE encompasses a simple programming model
from device to cloud. Rich services enable searching, analyzing, integrating,
reporting, and synchronizing of all data. Orcas will let you maintain data project
artifacts within VS Diagram.
Johnston drilled down to specifics. Some of his program managers demonstrated
key new features of Orcas. These demonstrations were prepared in Redmond using
video capture technology. Several members of the audience commented on the impressive
clarity of these visuals.
The first video demonstrated how you can use Orcas' XML Editor in VS to open
an XML file and generate a schema from it. The product manager leading the demo
observed that the noise ratio in XML files is high, with many elements that
don't even contain data. He showed how the Editor uses Intellisense to automate
much of the work required to filter this noise. The Editor goes to the schema
associated with a file and places the required elements in your buffer. You
need only to provide some of the data and commit when done, without typing any
extra items. The project manager also showed how the XML Editor provides you
with instantaneous validation of the XML files.
Johnston asked the audience how many have tried XML Editor. A few attendees
raised their hands. He then encouraged the audience to download the express
version from MSDN, observing that "customers think they have to buy additional
products, but they really don't."
Next up: a demonstration of another Orcas feature -- the XSLT Debugger. The
product manager demonstrating this feature showed how you can set break points
in the data files, as opposed to in the XSLT file, and how the debugger shows
from where the data is coming, what the transformation is doing, and the final
result. The product manager highlighted not only standalone debugging but also
how you can debug XSLT files from your project just as with a VB or C# program.
The third feature demonstrated will not be available until Rosario ships --
or perhaps even later. It's an XSD designer. A simple search operation was displayed,
highlighting features such as setting tic marks in the scrollbar to show results
on an entire tree. A more complex operation was also shown that involved looking
for the root elements of a schema, where you have an option to view in the designer
the most likely elements.
The final demonstration featured an entity data models (EDM) Wizard that generates
classes from the conceptual model, but the portion of this demo that produced
spontaneous audience applause was an EDM designer functionality that will not
be available in the Orcas beta release. This hotly anticipated functionality
is a database designer and an entity modeler. These features let you map a database
to a model, keeping the model in sync. The project manager leading this demonstration
created a user entity type from an user's table with drag-and-drop functionality,
where glyphs showed mapping of entity type to table. Sophisticated graphical
representations of entities and relationships enabled the user to work at the
level of the business relationships rather than programming abstractions. These
visuals demonstrated with database designer and entity modeler what has been
seen before in drawing programs -- but this was the first time the audience
had seen them working within a real development environment.
After the demonstrations, Johnston discussed framework innovation and ADO.NET.
New features included the first implementation of EDM, a query language (Entity
SQL), a new provider (Entity Client), a new object-rational mapping (ORM) stack
over Entity Client, and LINQ support over entities. Taken together, these features
provide a bridge between developers' ADO.NET expertise and the new data programming
world.
The ADO.NET Entity Framework will let you work with entity data at the conceptual
level and separate applications from database schemas. LINQ to Entities lets
you query data in terms of your programming language, and you'll be able to
program databases using .NET objects, and create, read, update, and delete directly
against the objects. Its overall goal is to minimize the time you spend programming
in objects.
Johnston added that the provider model puts the expertise in the data source,
enabling it to pick the right dialect instead of forcing developers to use the
least denominator syntax across systems.
He promised that Microsoft will provide developers with an integrated development
experience, with reusable artifacts that let you repurpose your investment in
code across the report writing and security space. He announced that Microsoft
is raising the level of abstraction by creating a "services ecosystem."
Johnston ended on a promise that he'd keep the faith with traditional DBMS developers,
including a continued commitment to ODBC, Java, PHP and others.
About the Author
Lee The's first computer was a state-of-the-art unit with 48K RAM and a 1MHz processor. He has been writing and editing computer magazine articles since then, in between scuba diving trips. He's based in the San Francisco Bay Area.