For the first time since my college days, I did a presentation for a few folks on Thursday night at the Central Ohio .Net Developers Group. The topic was ADO.Net data services. I really appreciated having the opportunity to speak to the group and I hope that I was able to bring some insight to the group on this emerging technology.

The format for the evening was "lightning talks" which meant that there were seven sessions lasting 15 short minutes each. This format really provided a way to get exposed to a lot of new technologies all within a 2 hour window. 15 minutes is just enough time to get exposed to the surface of the technology, but get a good enough feel for what is going on so you know whether or not you want to invest more time in getting more intimate with it.

Jeff Blankenburg posted to his blog each of the speakers and their subject matter, so I figured that I should probably get some info up on this blog to point folks in the right direction if they're looking to get started. Sometimes I find that there is so much out there on the internets that it's easy to get distracted by some of the noise that gets made about the tech. With this in mind, I am posting some of the most helpful links that really helped me understand the meat of the subject:

http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/
Where it all begins. Learn about pre-req's and download bits.

http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/archive/2008/02/03/why-astoria.aspx
Why Astoria? Discusses what problem domain the technology is solving.

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/bursteg/archive/2008/01/27/ado-net-data-services-screencasts.aspx
Screencasts. I love 'em.

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/bursteg/archive/2007/12/12/ado-net-data-services-part-1-building-a-simple-web-data-service.aspx
Step-by-step building a simple service.

http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2008/01/03/10073.aspx
More intermediate or advanced discussion on ADO.Net Data Services. He goes into detail about how you would implement your own data source (as opposed to using Entity Framework or LINQ-to-SQL). I'm a big fan of this blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/marcelolr/archive/2008/01/21/service-operations-in-ado-net-data-services.aspx
Add service methods to your web service. Great for implementing some of your own access logic.

http://lostintangent.com/category/adonet-data-services/
Very in-depth. If you find yourself geeked about ADO.Net Data Services after reading the above links, this is a great place to go to get your fill.