The Project Astoria team at Microsoft has extended the online service to enable development of experimental Astoria data services hosted by Microsoft, according to a blog on the project. The Astoria online service is an experimental effort to explore programming models for data on the Web, offered in the form of a service. The goal of the project is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that ca The Project Astoria team at Microsoft has extended the online service to enable development of experimental Astoria data services hosted by Microsoft, according to a blog on the project. The Astoria online service is an experimental effort to explore programming models for data on the Web, offered in the form of a service. The goal of the project is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by Web clients within corporate networks and across the Internet, according to Microsoft.Developers can build custom structured data stores as much as 100MB in size on the Web and access them anywhere via the Internet. These services can be the storage or data source for mashups or the backing store for Internet-enabled applications. They also can be applied to a scenario requiring a rich data service on the Web. The Astoria CTP was announced at the Mix 2007 conference this spring. To develop an Astoria data service, developers need a Passport account. Developers can build services by navigating the “Online Service” page for the project here. Technology Industry