What's New in VS2010 and .NET 4 for Data Drivers?

As reported by my colleague Kathleen Richards, the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 bits were released to MSDN subscribers Monday, with the public beta set for release today.

For those developing data-driven applications, the beta is expected to give developers a first look at "Entity Framework version 2" or what Microsoft dubs "Entity Framework 4" As reported, EF 4 adds support for n-tier templates, Plain Old CLR Objects (POCO) and persistence ignorance.

Developers can learn more about the updated functionality in the ADO.NET blog.

Some of the other key improvements to the Entity Framework, according to Microsoft, include integration with the ADO.NET Entity Framework Designer and T4 Templates in Visual Studio for customized code generation. Microsoft also added lazy loading and stored procedure mapping, improved LINQ support and SQL generation readability. The new release is expected to boost T-SQL performance, Microsoft said, among numerous other upgrades.

With this next generation of tooling, Microsoft increases its support for third-party databases beyond IBM's DB2. Quest Software is developing a database schema provider for Oracle that supports Visual Studio Team System 2010.

In the coming days and weeks, the editors of Redmond Developer News and Visual Studio Magazine want to hear your observations. Please drop me a line at [email protected].

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/20/2009 at 11:59 AM