Project Astoria

In addition to Project Jasper, the ADO.NET team is also releasing a second incubation project at Mix07 called Astoria. Project Astoria is the brainchild of Pablo Castro, resident System.Data expert and probably the best live demo giver I have ever seen. If you have never seen him speak, make sure you catch one of this talks either at Mix07 or one of the other Microsoft conferences.

Here is an overview of Project Astoria in Pablo’s own terms:

The goal of Microsoft Codename "Astoria" is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON.

Pablo pointed out to me on Friday that Astoria (his project) is a lot cooler then Jasper (my project) because Astoria isn’t merely shipping CTP bits, but also previewing a live service on the web. I will let the masses decide the winner of that argument – but it is fair to say the Astoria Online Service is quite cool.

You can read more about Project Astoria here on Pablo's blog. And the astute reader might notice some areas where Jasper and Astoria might integrate nicely. Don’t worry – we already started thinking about that, but as usual any and all feedback is welcome.