My experience to use ASTORIA online service was good !
For using the online service, it requires Microsoft .NET Passport login. After logging in .. I created my entity model, a simple one by creating four tables.
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Books
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Borrowers
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Librarians
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Transactions
You also need to specify the User ID, Password and the Service name through which the URI for your service will be decided.
With the simple interface for creating the Entities, and Properties (Data Base Fields) of the Entities and the Associations (Relationships)
Following Images will show you the steps
In the above image, you can see the Button for Creating a new Entity as well as for Creating Properties and Associations.
You can find all of the instructions for creating the EDM on the same page. You can click on the "Finish" button at the bottom of the page to proceed further.
After finishing, you'll be shown the conceptual model (CSDL) file for your EDM, as you can see below the one which I created.
The above image shows the URI to test the above service. this is
https://astoria.sandbox.live.com/users/MYTESTDBSERVICE/MYTESTDBSERVICE.rse
Note that the service can only be access through the secure HTTP channel, and your UserID/Password is required to access it.
That is, in my case I've to enter my User ID and Password, while others cannot access my EDM through their login credentials.
For the demonstration, you can have a look at NWind Data Service, Adventure Works Data service etc. which can be accessed through
Project Astoria Website http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/OnlineService.aspx
Also the service which I created, can be accessed through a simple tool which allows to interact with the service is as follows:
https://astoria.sandbox.live.com/Tools/raw.htm
The tool allows for the following Http-Verbs ( or Actions)
GET = Retreive
PUT = Update
POST = Insert
DELETE = Insert
While in the above image, you can see in the Request Data Section, that I did put a test XML with the HTTP Verb as Post to insert data.
Currently in the Image you can see HTTP Verb = Get, but the Request data is not subject to use with GET, but only PUT & POST.
You can see in the Output section that the data is displayed as the result of HTTP-GET operation along with the URI value which I have specified as
https://astoria.sandbox.live.com/users/MYTESTDBSERVICE/MYTESTDBSERVICE.rse/Books
The "Books" refers to the Entity which was created earlier.
I hope this gave enough insight to you about the Project "Microsoft codename Astoria" and lets stay tuned for more updates to come as the project is under
active development and we expect major security features and certain more features to be added to it.
Best Of Luck
raheel Hussain