14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has been focusing on a project associated with data access designed for enabling a fast and interactive development process for data applications for over a year now. And at MIX07 the ADO.NET incubation project has materialized under the Jasper code-name and a Community Technology Preview download was made available.
According to Shyam Pather, the Technical Lead (Development) for the SQL Notification Services Team Jasper is aimed at delivering rich O/R API for data access, but at the same time the project has to streamline excessive configuration and reduce design-time code generation.
"Building data-serving applications can be cumbersome and time consuming, requiring developers to create their own data layer, write queries, and then hook everything up to a UI. Using "Jasper", developers start with a connection string and can immediately begin programming the core of an application. "Jasper" uses a set of new technologies to make this happen," explained Jeff Derstadt, Software Design Engineer, Data Programmability.
In addition to rich query and O/R capabilities that come inherently with the Entity Framework, Jasper will also enable the dynamic production of data classes and will offer auto-binding capabilities. "Microsoft Codename "Jasper" is a set of components aimed at fulfilling the need for a rapid and iterative development experience for data. With "Jasper", you are able to just point at a database and immediately begin coding against its data using intuitive, domain-specific data classes. No configuration and no source code generation are required. Jasper works with existing application frameworks (including ASP.NET, WinForms, and WPF) and existing, real-world databases," stated Pather.