Microsoft's Project codename Astoria - online service

Raheel Hussain — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 05:28:00 GMT

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.

Books
Borrowers
Librarians
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

Microsoft Codename Astoria !

Raheel Hussain — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:18:00 GMT

Hello folks !

A recommended read about Microsoft codename "Astoria", an experimental project by Microsoft.

I'm listing down some of the highlights, I was able to understand from the mannual I downloaded.

This is a very interesting read, as well as the you can make your own data store upto 100 MB and use the Astoria
service to build the data service and access it from any where on the internet, while the toolkit can also be
downloaded to be used on your system with VS & AJAX enabled.

Here are the few extracts/highlights for your ease!

Project Astoria consists of a combination of patterns, libraries and an online service that explores the concept of data services for the web.

The goal of Astoria is to facilitate the creation of flexible data services that are naturally integrated with the web.
Astoria uses URIs to point to pieces of data and simple, well-known formats to represent that data, such as JSON (Javascript Simple Object Notation) and plain XML, while the default representation is XML.

JSON format is naturally and simply integrated with Javascript environments such as AJAX, can be retreived by simply setting a Acceptheader to application/json.

Codename Astoria is released in two forms, A downloadable toolkit and an online service. Both are focused on creation and operation of data services, but are aimed at difference scenarios.

The Astoria toolkit is a downloadable package that contains the Astoria runtime, documentation and examples that show how to use the toolkit. The toolkit is designed to allow ASP.NET developers to create data services directly in their ASP.NET applications, accessing their own database.
The Astoria online service is an experimental service that aims at exploring programming models for data on the web, offered in the form of a service.

Using the Astoria online service, web developers can create custom structured data stores on the web and access them from anywhere that they have internet access, This experimental release also includes a set of sample data-sets that are preloaded and readily accessible as data services.

Please you can visit http://astoria.mslivelabs.com for further information about the project.
Also, visit the Astoria Blog at Microsft MSDN.Regards !
raheel Hussain

Raheel Hussain : JSON

Microsoft's Project codename Astoria - online service

Microsoft Codename Astoria !