Tech·Ed Offers Previews of Powerful Tools

Boston—At Microsoft's Tech·Ed 2006 conference in Boston this week the pre-conference keynote on Sunday night discussed little of importance to developers—which was a good thing, as many attendees didn't arrive in time to hear it. Despite that, the breakout sessions contained plenty for developers to get excited about. Name changes, however necessary, aren't among them. In an orgy of nomenclature revision, Microsoft has eliminated WinFx as a separate product name, announcing it would henceforth simply be part of the .NET Framework 3.0, due to ship with Vista. Monad has become Windows PowerShell, InfoCard has changed to CardSpace, and Content Management System has merged with Sharepoint 2007.

Entity Data Model
Brand-new names have appeared as well. First, and perhaps most intriguing, is a concept called the Entity Data Model (EDM), which is part of a future version of ADO.NET, currently labeled "vNext." In a session called "Next-generation Data Access in .NET Applications with ADO.NET vNext," Pablo Castro discussed how ADO.NET will help solve some pernicious database problems—including the oft-requested object/relational mapping capability—by letting developers visually create entities, which are essentially client-side "views" of database data constructed from fields in one or more database tables—application-level views of the data that embody the entities the application deals with.