At Mix 07 , ADO.NET Team has introduced two incubation project , Jasper and Astoria .
"Jasper"
Jasper is build on the ADO.NET Entity Framework , enables developers to start with merely a connection string and immediately begin programming the core of application without building their own data layer ,writing queries and bind data to UI
“Jasper” uses a set of new technologies to make this happen:
Official Blog:http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2007/04/30/project-codename-jasper-announced-at-mix-07.aspx
CTP downloading:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=471BB3AC-B31A-49CD-A567-F2E286715C8F&displaylang=en
"Astoria"
"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.
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http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2007/04/30/project-codename-astoria-announced-at-mix-07.aspx