As Microsoft announces service pack releases of its Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 technology, developers say the enhancements make for faster, better development. Microsoft’s new service packs feature the .Net Framework Client Profile, ADO.Net Data Services and ADO.Net Entity Framework.

Microsoft is releasing to manufacturing the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 (Service Pack 1) and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Aug. 11, and developers have weighed in saying the new offering enhances their capabilities for building and delivering applications.

Although Microsoft is delivering new functionality in these service pack releases, the offerings provide a host of advancements that might otherwise have been made into an entire new release, if not a "point" or "dot-one" release. Some early users of the technology have been able to build functional projects based on Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .Net Framework 3.5 SP1, using the more model-driven aspects of the technology, among other things.

In an interview with eWeek, Shanku Niyogi, Microsoft product unit manager for the technology, said the releases come nine months after the release of the .Net Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 and include a substantial number of updates based directly on customer feedback.

"With these SP1 releases, we’re doing something a little different," Niyogi said. "We’re providing the typical guidance, but we’re also looking at customer feedback and the way people are building applications, and we’re putting in building blocks to help them do that better. We’re giving them a more model-driven approach to development."

The service packs include new features such as the .Net Framework Client Profile for faster deployment of Windows-based applications, multiple enhancements to ASP.Net, and support for database application development through the ADO.Net Entity Framework, ADO.Net Data Services and integration with SQL Server 2008.

"Another big area of focus is we’re making data driven applications better and easier to build and to be flexible and able to evolve over time," said Sam Gazitt, a product manager in the Microsoft Developer Division.

"We’re enabling developers to be able to build application [user interface] and customize that in a model-driven way," Niyogi said.

Microsoft also is promoting more of a rapid application development scheme with the service pack releases, he said. "We’re making the challenge of application development a much easier and quicker proposition."

The .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 includes several improvements to the Microsoft CLR (Common Language Runtime), such as the ability to generate managed code that improves application start-up time by 20 to 45 percent and end-to-end application execution time up to 10 percent, and the ability of managed code to take advantage of the ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) security feature in Windows Vista, Microsoft officials said. In addition, .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 has improvements for the creation of rich-client applications and line-of-business applications using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).

Moreover, the .Net Framework 3.5, released in November 2007, already contains features for developing Web 2.0 applications and dynamic Web sites, including new server controls and a client-script library for AJAX-style applications. Yet with .Net Framework 3.5 SP1, the .Net Framework now offers support for ASP.Net Dynamic Data, which provides a rich scaffolding framework that allows rapid data-driven development without writing code.

In addition, the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 includes ADO.Net Data Services and ADO.Net Entity Framework, which raise the level of abstraction for database programming and supply both a new model-based paradigm and a rich, standards-based framework for creating data-oriented Web services. With this service pack, Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 also support SQL Server 2008.

"Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is more than a service pack. It is the ship vehicle for the Entity Framework as well as "Astoria" aka ADO.Net Data Services as well as Dynamic Data," said Stephen Forte, a developer focusing on the Microsoft platform. "So it is full of new features on top of any ‘service pack’ items we may care about."

For their part, to help medical staff reduce manual, paper-based processes, Misys Healthcare Systems and Veracity Solutions collaborated to create FreeNatal, a Web-based application that provides prenatal care providers with an easy-to-use, secure interface for managing patients’ records. Using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 SP1, eight members from the Misys-Veracity team created the application. By taking advantage of these powerful technologies, the team increased development speed by 60 percent, enabling accelerated market delivery and further strengthening their respective positions in the health care informatics industry.

"It’s a rare thing to have the right business opportunity at the right time with the right people," said Galen Earl Murdock, president and CEO of Veracity Solutions. "It’s even [rarer] to have the right technology at the same time. Such was our experience with FreeNatal. ADO.Net Data Services and ADO.Net Entity Framework were precisely what the team needed to deliver a secure, robust back-end for this product. It’s not often the planets align like that."

Murdock said he was initially skeptical about the Microsoft technology. "We knew that FreeNatal would be a rich, AJAX-based Web application. We also knew that we’d store the data in SQL Server," he said. "The question was how to connect the two—what to put in the middle. Entity Framework seemed like a no-brainer, but we were wary about the new technology on the block—ADO.Net Data Services. Imagine how pleased we were to have a technology completely measure up to our needs and expectations."

Meanwhile, Gregg Jensen, a senior software engineer at Veracity Solutions, said:

After many years of manually architecting my own data access layers, I can honestly say that Entity Framework was able to accomplish everything of the systems that I have built, and much more. In projects of the past I have spent many weeks both maintaining and updating data access layers, and it is great to see that Microsoft has build a data access layer that handles all of the setup and maintenance for you. I have been very impressed by the ease with which queries and updates can be performed using LINQ [Language Integrated Query] to Entities, and the flexibility of the underlying model. FreeNatal, as well as other new projects I have worked on, have benefited greatly from the time savings of using Entity Framework, as well as the maintainability.  Microsoft has truly taken out a major piece of any new project, the data access layer, and done all of the work for you.

Moreover, regarding ADO.Net Data Services, Jensen said that in a world of growing interconnected services, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain compatibility from application to application. Yet, ADO.Net Data Services now gives developers the ability to develop reliable, secure and reusable services without needing to interact directly with each company that might use them, he said.

"On the FreeNatal project we were able to quickly add new features using JavaScript and HTML, with rarely needing to change the underlying ADO.NET Data Service that handled all of the data access," Jensen said.

In addition, the innovation behind the SQL—like URL query capability of Data Services is a technology that the internet has needed for a long time, Jensen said.

While ADO.Net Data Services comes with most of what you need right out of the box, it is also very customizable with the ability to add focused queries and updates using Service Operations. We have used Query and Change interceptors extensively on FreeNatal.  Throughout the application we were able to write simple URL queries, and allow Data Services to automatically filter the data retrieved by each user that should have access to it. We were able to use change interceptors to update interrelated fields such as an estimated date of delivery, and the gestational age of a fetus, which allowed us a simple abstraction of updating a single field and having the results cascade through the database.

Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at Twentysix New York, said:

The reality is that ADO.Net is still very much alive and well and given EF’s [Entity Framework] reliance on it, it’s not likely to be going away. Conventional ADO.Net code will likely remain the most efficient way to perform data access. Even if Microsoft developers were to flock to ORM programming in droves, ADO.Net would likely remain in place and be at least the .Net data access analog to ‘native code.’

Meanwhile, "Using the Entity Framework has significantly sped up our development cycle by removing a lot of the custom code we have to write," said David Copple, lead developer at The Test Factory. "The Entity Framework took away the tedium of having to write standard data access code and business objects, which gave our team a big productivity boost."