Incremental Improvement, Important Milestones, and Complementary Goals

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Building software is an exercise in incremental improvement, and when an important milestone is reached and new work is made available for the first time the team who worked so hard to build software that is useful, reliable, and secure look forward to feedback from the user community and the marketplace.

For the Data Programmability team here at Microsoft we have reached a few of those milestones for JDBC and ADO.NET recently and shipped Community Tech Previews (CTPs) to get your feedback.

The SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver 1.1 CTP is available and features some important improvements including integrated authentication.  If you build Java apps that target SQL Server or know someone who does - we want to get your feedback.

The ADO.NET vNext CTP, announced today, features two major incremental improvements. ADO.NET Entity Framework providing support for a higher level of abstraction for data programming, and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) enabled ADO.NET through both LINQ to Entities and LINQ to DataSet.

If you use ADO.NET today, or are looking for a good excuse to build a managed code database application you can find more about the CTP from ADO.NET team blog or download it directly from the Download Center.

All this points out some of the unique responsibilities the Data Programmability team has within Microsoft. At the same time we need to both provide the best possible experience for database programmers using SQL Server and the best possible experience for database programmers using the Microsoft platform. I am often asked if these two responsibilities are in conflict. In practice we find that providing first class support for deployment of applications that use platforms like Java, or supporting development of applications that run on databases like Oracle is precisely what our customers need. We're confident that a successfully deployed Java application on Windows with SQL Server will eventually lead to a new .NET application and a successfully deployed .NET application on Windows with Oracle will likely lead to a new SQL Server application.   So rather than conflict, the two responsibilities are complementary.

Share your experiences, we have a dedicated team waiting for your feedback.

Britt...

Director of Program Management
Data Programmability
Microsoft Corporation