Francois and Erik both attended the MVP Summit that just occured in Seattle, and we had a chance to visit the ADO.NET Data Services team, where Pablo Castro gave a few talks on potential ideas for the future of that same technology.

At nVentive, we have long used a Domain-Driven Design approach to designing software. Our architectures used to rely on Entities, that would use DTOs to transfer themselves to another tier. This leads to a few interesting challenges:

• Do you share the entities ? Do you share the actual DLL?
• What if the application needs an application-model, not the entity-model?
• How do you implement the Unit Of Work pattern ? deal with derived properties and business logic?
• How do you make sure things always get revalidated on the server tier?
• When should you be modifying properties, versus calling a specialized service?
• and more...

Now we have started evaluating Command Query Seperated architectures, where data and commands are completly distinct.

The current approach is to expose the read-only data through REST (using ADO.NET Data Services). This approach is easy to use, and best of all, allows the querying of data through LINQ, which is then serialized into the URL (i.e. http://employeeSystem/Employees/$Where=firstname-eq-bob).

The current idea for the command part is to expose a second endpoint through REST (using ADO.NET Data Services) to expose the structure of the different commands. We would then use the REST syntax to create commands, edit them, and retrieve them. A runner would then execute the commands and they are queued up, altering the data.

In the coming months we will be prototyping these ideas into Umbrella, so keep on reading and if you have any thoughts, just let us know !