Thursday, November 01, 2007

Has Project Jasper Been Swallowed by a Black Hole?

All's been quiet on the Jasper front since Andrew Conrad's last post in the Project Jasper forum on October 3, 2007. In reply to a question about the availability of an update to the Jasper CTP that requires Orcas Beta 1, Andy wrote:

The Jasper CTP only currently works with VS 2008 Beta 1.  It will not work with Beta 2, and there are no work arounds to this.

We are currently trying to assess whether to release an update to the Jasper CTP for Beta 2 (and VS RTM).

The last update to my "Jasper" to Deliver Dynamic ADO.NET 3.0 post was on May 8, 2007, Andy posted A walk through the Jasper API with IronPython - Part 1 on May 10, and I wrote an illustrated version of Andy's walkthrough as Using the Entity Framework with IronPython 1.1 in Project Jasper on May 11.

Carl Perry's last post was A Quick Jasper Sample on May 1; it promised:

In my next blog post I'll post some samples using Jasper with ASP.NET and Windows Forms.  I'll also be talking about applying your own custom business logic and how easy that is.  Stay tuned!

But there was no "next blog post."

Andy's now the Developer Lead for Project Astoria, so I doubt if he'll continue to keep folks informed about what appeared to be the ADO.NET team's attempt to create "Entity Framework on Rails."

The move to the Dynamic Language Runtime seems to have added a bit of indirection to the project.

Update 11/2/2007: Andrew Conrad left a detailed comment about the current status and future of Project Jasper. Andy notes in the comment that he's still the Dev Lead for Project Jasper and LINQ to DataSet.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am actually the dev lead for Project Astoria, Project Jasper, and the DataSet.

We have a Beta 2 update to Jasper which we are using in house - but decided not to release this publicly due to the limited amount of feedback we got from folks wanting an update. (Believe it or not, our management is very aware of the opinions of our early adopters with regards to these type of incubation projects). We could do a release for Orcas RTM, but need to hear that developers are interested in this.

We remain very interested in targeting dynamic languages and are still doing a lot of thinking about where this fits in our overall road map. In general, we think there are some specific features of Jasper that are very compelling – but aren’t entirely sure the makeup of the initial CTP was the right design. Also (without letting the cat out of the bag too much) there are some features that were part of Jasper CTP that will be showing up in other projects being announced over the next few weeks.

To be specific, we are making some progress porting the code to be DLR based. We have also been thinking about getting Jasper working as a client for Astoria services. Other than that where we go with the technology is very fluid – an in part is based on the feedback we get from the development community.

At some point in the near future, I will try to post a more detailed “state of the project” update to my blog.