Orcas EDM Wizard and Designer Previewed at VSLive! SFO

Last night the ADO.NET Team posted EDM Wizard and Designer Featured in VSLive! San Francisco Keynote, which briefly describes Britt Johnson's "Data Explosion: The Last and Next Decade in Data Management with the Microsoft Data Platform" keynote. Near the end of the presentation he demonstrated the Entity Data Model (EDM) Wizard and EDM Designer, neither of which made the Orcas March 2007 CTP cut, with a pair of screencasts.

See the 3/29/2007 and 5/21/2007 updates below.

A careful reading of this paragraph from the post:

Britt also featured 5 short videos or screencasts that demonstrated some of the work, specifically around Tools, that the Data Programmability team (including the ADO.NET) has been doing. These videos provide some great information and a preview of the new EDM Wizard coming in Orcas, as well as a sneak preview of a new EDM Designer that we can expect to see released after the upcoming Orcas release [Emphasis added].

indicates that the Orcas RTM bits won't include the EDM Designer. Frans Bouma and I have added questions about this to the post's comments. I also asked the same question in the ADO.NET Orcas forum.

A similar post in the Data Programmability Team blog has a slightly expanded list of new features and screencasts:

These videos provide some great information and a preview of the new XML Editor, XSLT Debugger, and EDM Wizard coming in Orcas, as well as a sneak preview of a new XSD Designer and EDM Designer that we can expect to see released after the upcoming Orcas release.

Elisa Johnson's VSLive Keynote - San Francisco post of the same date says:

During his presentation Britt talked a lot about Conceptual Data Programming and where Microsoft plans to focus on for future innovation in the Data Access space. He also gave a sneak peak at two tools that hadn't previously been seen... the much anticipated EDM Designer and the XSD Designer (you can expect to see more on these sometime after the upcoming Orcas release).

A working preview of the EDM Designer debuted in September 2006; my October 4, 2006 New Entity Data Model Graphic Designer Prototype post provided a walkthrough with the Northwind database.

Sanjay Nagamangalam, the ADO.NET Program Manger who presented the EDM Designer screencast, posted on March 3, 2007 the following message in the ADO.NET Orcas forum:

An EDM designer is foremost on our minds and we are looking to provide a tool for Beta 1. We don’t have a date yet though.

Of course, the message was accompanied by the usual "This posting is provided 'AS IS' with no warranties, and confers no rights" disclaimer.

Shades of ObjectSpaces. Déjà vu all over again. Please say it isn't so.

Update 3/28/2007: Visual Studio Magazine writer Lee Thé writes in his "Microsoft Moves DBMS into the VS Developer Mainstream" article that covered Britt Johnson's keynote:

The final demonstration featured an entity data models (EDM) Wizard that generates classes from the conceptual model. But the portion of this demo that roduced spontaneous applause from the audience was an EDM designer functionality that will not be available in the Orcas beta release. This hotly anticipated functionality is a database designer and an entity modeler. These features let you map a database to a model, keeping the model in sync. The project manager leading this demonstration created a user entity type from an users' table with drag-and-drop functionality, where glyphs showed mapping of entity type to table. Sophisticated graphical representations of entities and relationships enabled the user to work at the level of the business relationships rather than programming abstractions. [Emphasis added]

It remains to be seen if Lee's report is correct. Stay tuned for Microsoft's official confirmation or denial of the EDM Designer's disappearance from Orcas.

Note: Lee's report on VSLive!'s Monday keynote, "Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and ASP.NET AJAX" by Prashant Sridharan is here, and his coverage of K. D. Hallman's general session address, "Visual Studio Everywhere: Tools for Office, Office Business Applications, and Custom Application Extensibility," for Redmond Developer News is here. Click here to read the March 28, 2007 VSLive! Show Daily.

InfoWorld's Paul Krill mentions the EDM Designer in his March 27, 2007 "Microsoft maps data management plans" article without discussing the Designer's future availablity. He notes that the EDM Wizard, XSD Designer, and XSLT Debutter are slated for the Orcas Beta release in May. Elisa Johnson says that The XSD Designer will arrive post-Orcas.

Kevin Hoffman complains bitterly in his Microsoft finally shows off their EDM designer... but it won't ship with Orcas?!? post about the apparent demise of the EDM Designer.

Update 5/21/2007: The 1:04:00 video of Britt Johnson's keynote is available here. Click here for Prashant Sridharan's keynote video.

Update 3/29,2007: Julie Lerman—2,500 miles from San Francisco at the DevConnections conference in Florida—reports in What to expect in next (and future) Orcas bits for Entity Framework :

Britt Johnston did a keynote and showed [a video of] the latest prototype of the EDM Modeler and also let us know that it won't be ready for Orcas but they plan to release it shortly after Orcas. This is really frustrating, but it is just the reality and as developers we know the difficulties of designing tools... so it is what it is and until we have it, I will learn a LOT with the XML and personally hold off on doing any seriously complex modeling. [Emphasis added.]

Pending official word from Microsoft, I'm inclined to believe Julie's rendition, although telepathy might be involved. I'm still waiting for someone from the ADO.NET team to post an official response, either as a blog comment or an answer to my question in the ADO.NET Orcas forum.

Note: There's more from Julie's report on Brian Dawson's two Entity Framework presentations at DevCon in her post.

Technorati tags: Entity Framework, Entity Data Model, EDM, EDM Wizard, EDM Designer, Orcas, ObjectSpaces, Object/Relational Mapping