Welcome to the Microsoft Data blog

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Welcome to the Microsoft Data blog. I’m Samuel Druker and I lead a group that’s responsible for building technology that enables great data-enabled applications.

We have a lot of technologies under our umbrella and no matter what part of the Windows platform you use we’ve got you covered. The team has been building solutions for data programmability for many years, from the early formation of ODBC, the advances of OLEDB, core XML processing support with MSXML, ADO with Visual Basic, TDS and SOAP access to SQL Server, JDBC connectivity, working with Visual Studio on XML editing, XSLT debugging, and of course the new wave of productivity with the .NET Framework with ADO.NET and System.Xml. We also have been a big part of the WinFS project. The main way to get all the details is to visit our MSDN sites: msdn.com/data and msdn.com/xml.

We have been working hard on the next set of improvements for our developers since the release of .NET Framework 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 last fall.

At PDC last September lots of folks talked about the futures of many of these technologies. Of course, Anders Hejlsberg from the C# team introduced the LINQ project which sets the stage for a revolution in the way that we program across the board. Dave Remy gave a talk about XLinq (.doc), Erik Meijer talked about LINQ in Visual Basic, (really, our XML folks were out in force) and some folks may have seen my PDC talk last September about ADO.NET, the EDM, and Entity SQL. Pablo Castro did a great series of demos for ADO.NET 2.0.

Since then, the XML team has been working on building and fleshing out XLinq. They also have been working very closely with the Visual Basic team on XML Literals for VB 9.0 which provide a fantastic experience for XML processing in Visual Studio. Check out the Channel 9 videos from September. We also released our new JDBC driver a few months ago, and our protocols and native client teams landed SQL Server 2005 SP1 in that time frame. I keep telling the team the reward for hard work is usually more hard work ;).

In more specific news we are sharing some more details about our vision for programming in the data platform and an overview of Entities in ADO.NET.

Of course, this dovetails nicely into all the great work happening on LINQ. Check out this Channel 9 video with myself and Anders. There's also some more material about the Entity Data Model. Lots of other folks from team are blogging about stuff, and we'll have some other stuff coming online this summer. Soma just blogged about the 1-2 punch of LINQ and Entities also.

We’d love to hear from you about current projects, futures, and anything else. Our MSDN forums (below) are a great place to ask questions, share thoughts and have discussions about developing for Microsoft's Data Platform.

Of course, comments here are always welcome.

Sam Druker