Studio for Entity Framework Released

I am happy to announce that we have already released Studio Enterprise 2011 v3. Among the many new features in this release is an entire new product, our Studio for Entity Framework. This new set of data source components are designed to work on top of the Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework and RIA Services. They give you ease-of-use and performance enhancements for your WinForms, WPF and Silverlight applications. Our design-time components make it easy for any level of .NET developer to work with Entity Framework and the Virtual Mode feature improves performance for even the largest dataset. Highlights of Studio for Entity Framework

• Multi-platform support for Silverlight, WPF, and even WinForms!
• Design-time data source components allow you to set up your views directly on the designer surface.
• Virtual Mode improves performance for huge data sets by asynchronously retrieving data as the user scrolls through records.
• Live Views with LiveLinq save time, improve quality, and make coding in MVVM much easier.
• Smart client-side caching does most of the work for you so you can focus on your business logic.

Working across three platforms, WinForms, WPF and Silverlight, the built in smart client caching in our Entity Framework product speeds up the development of typical line of business applications and allows developers to write less code to achieve their goal. To see this in action, check out our updated live demo. The demo is published in Silverlight (because that's the easiest platform to deliver across the Web), but keep in mind that everything you see in Silverlight is available in WinForms and WPF too. One of the most significant features, and also most visual, is the Virtual Mode technology. Virtual Mode technology allows you to navigate through large data sets asynchronously. It works like paging on the data layer, but the user can scroll through the data as if all rows were on the client. As the user scrolls, chunks of data are retrieved from the source page by page and disposed of as necessary. We first offered this feature nearly a decade ago with our DataObjects for .NET (hey, they're actually still around). We got a lot of requests for this type of asynchronous loading feature in WPF and Silverlight, so we wound up taking it well beyond just a feature in our datagrid control and provide it to you on the data layer itself, through the Entity Framework (and RIA Services if you're using Silverlight). So now you can have virtual mode across multiple platforms, many different UI controls, and all by just simply setting one property.