One of the most well known cloud computing vendors is Amazon, which offers not just VMs but cloud-based storage and database services. Amazon’s SimpleDB uses XML to accept queries and spit back the result. There are also more integrated approaches. For instance, Salesforce.com lets developers write applications in its custom programming language Apex Code, which includes language constructs that hook into Salesforce.com’s database.

InfoWorld reviewed a few of these cloud-based databases in its examination of a new breed of simple, non-relational databases. Although the article didn’t look at Azure SQL Data Services (SDS) — they’re relational, and Azure isn’t even out yet — it did raise some questions that Microsoft shouldn’t ignore.
As InfoWorld sees it, the new breed of databases forego much of SQL’s data integrity patterns in favor of simpler query-response transactions. That may not be suitable for banks and other critical applications, but it’s just fine for many situations.

Since many of those non-critical applications are just the kind that companies might consider to try out Azure, Microsoft may be missing out on an opportunity by only providing full a full SQL database service in Azure. On the other hand, providing this sort of powerful service without a simpler database-ish offering could help drive home the message that Azure is intended for real, heavy, enterprise-level applications.

And of course, if programmers really want a simple, name-value, XML-based service, it won’t be hard to write one in Azure that uses SQL Data Services on the backend.

Also of note:

*The new .NET Framework Client Profile Setup Package which provides a setup installer that enables a simpler installation for .NET client applications on machines that do not already have the .NET Framework installed. According to Microsoft’s Guthrie, the .NET Framework Client Profile setup contains just those assemblies and files in the .NET Framework that are typically used for client application scenarios;

*WPF data binding and editing improvements that include: StringFormat support within {{ Binding }} expressions to enable easy formatting of bound values and better handling and conversion support for null values in editable controls;

*Better Intellisense support within VS 2008 for popular Javascript libraries such as JQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, and ExtJS; and

*Visual Web Developer Express now comes with the SQL Server 2008 Express Beta.

Scott Guthrie — He’s responsible for Microsoft’s myriad of Web application development endeavors, including ASP.NET, IIS and Silverlight, he writes several posts a week, he answers just about all the questions readers ask, and he offers lots of downloads. ‘Nuff said.

Sara Ford — This blogger posts a daily tip to make life a little easier for those who spend several hours a day inside Visual Studio.

Visual Basic Team — This is the official blog for Microsoft’s Visual Basic development team. The group frequently points to tutorial videos, code samples and other resources. LINQ, not surprisingly, has been a big topic as of late.

Oren Eini — This Israeli developer, who goes by the blog name Ayende Rahein and is the author of Rhino Mocks, writes two or three times a day about programming methodologies, open-source tools for .NET and scads of other relevant topics.

Are there any .NET blogs you visit on a frequent basis? Do they fit into one of the many topics in the list at left? Let us know and we’ll add them to the blog roll forthwith.

Lerman took some time at the end of her trip to e-mail us with some thoughts on the Entity Framework.  Read these comments by Julie Lerman, and read ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 ships; ups LINQ to SQL performance too.

On LINQ-to-SQL performance – Lerman discussed updates to Entity Framework that improve performance. She notes, too, that performance comparisons can sometimes mislead. She wrote:

If you are comparing LINQ to SQL with something like streaming data into a dataReader in ADO.NET, you will get different performance, but this is not at all comparing apples to apples. I do know that using Compiled Queries in LINQ to SQL will result in major performance improvements. Entity Framework now has Compiled Queries as well.

ASP.NET, EF, and the Model View Controller – She wrote:

While you can plug EF into ASP.NET very easily, there are two scenarios that take a bit of finagling – caching data and moving data across tiers. The n-tier issue is not only for ASP.NET of course, but is only really an issue if you are dealing with concurrency and need to maintain the state of data with respect to original values and current values.

And, regarding the Model View Controller for ASP.NET …

It has huge appeal to people who were doing web development before ASP.NET came out because of the return to the purity of stateless pages vs. all the hair-pulling around trying to fake persistence across post backs.  Right now LINQ to SQL seems to be the DAL of choice for MVC but it will work with any ORM tool that exposes .NET Objects, so LINQ to Entities falls into that category as well. I haven’t played with any of these bits yet.

We also asked Lerman if she had any general comments on Entity Framework. She wrote:

I’m really pleased that Entity Framework Beta 3 is finally out along with the new CTP of the tools. I hope that at this point, people have stopped worrying that Entity Framework will go the way of ObjectSpaces, because it absolutely will not. The team has been very responsive to feedback and the v1 of Entity Framework will be a lot further along than they had originally planned for v1.

As you’ve noticed, we try to avoid promoting in the blog anything and everything that our parent site publishes. (This helps explain why the Shameless Plug Dept. is so poorly staffed.) This learning guide, though, is a bit of a special case.

First, it’s about user groups. If you aren’t a member of one, you should join — and not just for the free pizza and swag. You get to network, learn about job openings in your area and take in presentations by .NET experts.

Second, in our effort to finish this learning guide in a timely manner (read: before the next New England blizzard does us in, once and for all), we certainly missed some important .NET, Visual Basic, C#, C++ or SQL developer user groups.

So, if you are so inclined, we’d appreciate it if you could take a moment or three to check out the .NET User Groups Learning Guide and let us know which groups we missed. You can either leave a comment here or, as instructed on every page of the learning guide, send us an email. Either way, we’ll add your user group to the list.

First there was Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. Then there was ParallelFX, an update to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and a toolset for programming Silverlight 1.1 — oops, we mean Silverlight 2.0 — in Visual Studio 2008.

The latest contribution is the ASP.NET 3.5 Extension CTP. This, as Scott Guthrie explains, includes a bunch of stuff. There’s better history support for ASP.NET AJAX, tools for speedier development of data-driven Web sites and support for Silverlight.

Two things in particular jump out.

One is the ASP.NET MVC, or Model View Controller. This is a much ballyhooed framework for dividing the components of a Web application into models (which maintain state), views (which display UI) and controllers (which handle end user interactions). As Guthrie puts it in his introduction to the MVC, “Maintaining a clean separation of concerns makes the testing of applications much easier, since the contract between different application components are more clearly defined and articulated.”

The other is ADO.NET Data Services, previously known as Astoria and intricately linked to the forthcoming ADO.NET Entity Framework. Astoria’s appeal is its ability to take relational data and make it a service that can be consumed by client applications in networks and across the Internet. More information about this release can be found in our story, ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 ships; ups LINQ-to-SQL performance.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

As a result, Soma Somasegar, corporate vice president in Microsoft’s Developer, has recently posted a roadmap of sorts for getting Visual Studio to support SQL Server 2008.

Two notes here:

• Visual Studio 2005 already supports the November CTP of SQL Server 2008, which came out before Visual Studio 2008 reached RTM.
• When the next SQL Server 2008 CTP is released, a patch for Visual Studio 2008 support will accompany it. Full tool support, meanwhile, is in the works for the RTM version of SQL Server 2008.

More specifics on Visual Studio, .NET Framework and SQL Server compatibility can be found in the Data Programmability group’s blog entry, Connecting to Pre-Release Versions of SQL Server 2008.

However, you may not know that LINQ is extensible — that is, it can be programmed to query data types other than those cited above. For example, there’s a LINQ to Amazon API that will query Amazon.com’s book listings, and interest in LINQ to NHibernate is also percolating.

A third implementation, LINQ.Flickr, will query the popular photo-sharing site. It merits mention today because its author, Mehfuz Hossain, has posted a brief introduction to the LinqExtender tool, available here on CodePlex, which makes LINQ extensibility possible.

You can read Hossain’s LinqExtender introduction here. It sounds like more blog entries about that tool are on the way as well.

UPDATED DEC. 7 — Jonathan Allen over at InfoQ has a recent post introducing the world to Bart de Smet’s LINQSQO, which is a standard query operator that, in taking a deep dive into LINQ, aims to show .NET programmers how LINQ works.