The ADO team's ADO.Net Entities moves the data model up from the physical structure of relational tables to a "data model that more accurately represents business entities such as 'Customer' or 'Order' that could map to multiple relational tables and views," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. His blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/default.aspx) is frequently a source of insight into what is going on at Microsoft.

Entities is planned for the next version of Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas." A preview of Entities is due before the end of this year.

Entities will allow developers to define complex mapping to relational data, enabling development of new business structures when the data schema cannot be changed, Somasegar said.

"You can think about Entities as a declarative way to specify the structure of a business object, which you can then add business logic to and, through the power of LINQ (Language-Integrated Query), be able to query over them as well." Somasegar said. "Entities will allow us to provide a common data model within the familiar ADO.Net environment that can be used across high-level functions such as reporting, replication, and BI (business intelligence)."

With LINQ, developers do not need to learn separate query syntaxes when querying over data domains such as XML, Relational and Objects.