Microsoft has released a number of exciting new tools and technologies that certainly bear some watching! These are preview releases so the usual caveats apply about installing these on a production system.

The "home" page for Microsoft's Data Platform is here and it contains the most up to date information about the various shiny new pieces.

The main bits are ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3, ADO.NET Data Services CTP1, and ADO.NET Entity Framework Tools CTP2.

So what exactly is the Entity Framework? It's a toolset and framework that enables a developer to visually design and model data driven applications, both forms based and web based.

Collectively these technologies are part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions which are in preview mode at the moment. Combined these technologies allow a developer to expose data from their applications in well known formats, some of which are not Microsoft specific such as JSON and REST and also in standards based formats such as XML.

There are a number of QuickStarts that the ASP.NET team has made available. Also as part of this release the ASP.NET MVC framework is available.

Go check it out!