I was reading through my feeds when I found a post of Bart De Smet that summed up some of the newly announced “stuff” at Mix 07 .

One announcement in particular caught my eye it was the project codenamed Astoria . Astoria is a technology that will expose a data store through an ADO.NET Entity model using HTTP as transport technology.
It’s called a data service which can be consumed by web clients. The advantage is the HTTP protocol that is being used. This means that everywhere where you can access the internet you can also access the data service. It will pass through proxies, firewalls and so on…

Another nice thing about it is that Astoria not only allows “Read” functionality using the HTTP GET verb, but also “Create” using HTTP POST, “Update” using HTTP PUT and finally “Delete” using HTTP DELETE.

There are 3 formats in which the data is being sent over the wire:

- XML
- RDF & XML
-JSON

The main target groups are the “new” web technologies, like SilverLight & AJAX, but you can also use it in regular desktop applications. All you need is an internet connection.

Currently they released a first CTP that is meant to give you an idea on how they see the concept of Data Services. You can download it already at the site http://astoria.mslivelabs.com . There are some other downloads as well as an online service that demos the technology in a limited form (only reading is possible).

Some links to get you started:

Whitepapers: http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/resources.aspx
Downloads: http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/downloads.aspx

FAQ: http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/faq.aspx

I’m currently busy downloading the prerequisits like the Visual Studio .Net “Orcas” bèta 1. I’m downloading the VCP images.