the ‘bee log

Udi Dahan has a post up commenting on the Astoria project coming out of the ADO.NET team in which he entreats, “please, Microsoft, just stop.”

I have to say that I feel absolutely the opposite way. I see Astoria is a step in the right direction. That’s not to say I’m any kind of acolyte of the REST/SOAP wars or even that I think Astoria proscribes a better way to do data access. All I’m saying is that it’s nice to see alternatives.

Is Astoria going to be useful in my present scenario? Probably not. When you add authorship and metadata and a few other key services to the mix will it make a sweet service for lo-fi, quick and dirty mashup’s? I sure think so.

Another benefit of Astoria is that it dogfoods the “service builder” aspects of the Entity Framework. I think this approach to experiencing the development, well, experience is bound to have positive effects when/if EF becomes available. Who knows they may find ways to improve the API, code, etc.

One of my complaints about Microsoft has always been the fairly monolithic approach to guidance, tools, etc. I like what I’m seeing now; variety is the spice of life.