Claudio Caldato, Senior Program Manager of Microsoft's Interoperability Technical Strategy team, has announced the release of a new project that bridges PHP and .NET. Called the 'PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services,' it makes it easier for PHP developers to take advantage of ADO.NET Data Services, a set of features recently added to the .NET Framework. ADO.NET Data Services offer a simple way to expose any sort of data in a RESTful way.

ADO.NET Data Services (formerly known as Project “Astoria”) is a technology used to expose a wide range of data sources through a RESTful service interface. Data sources can be relational databases, XML files, and so on. ADO.NET Data Services defines a flexible addressing and query interface using a URL convention, as well as the usual resource manipulation methods on data sources (it supports the full range of Create/Read/Update/Delete operations).

Caldato writes:

"There is full support for ADO.NET Data Services in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 as well as in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010; this includes direct support for both creating and consuming data services directly from the development environment. You can find more information about ADO.NET Data Services here, (I recommend the “How do I…” videos)."

• Murach’s ADO.NET 3.5, LINQ, and the Entity Framework with C# 2008