The technology code named Astoria is a technology that enables applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within corporate networks and across the internet. The Astoria data service is reachable over regular HTTP requests, and standard HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE are used to perform operations against the service. The use of web-friendly technologies make Astoria ideal as a data back-end for AJAX-style applications, Rich Interactive Applications and other applications that need to operate against data that lives across the web.

http://blogs.msdn.com/davbosch/archive/2007/05/10/project-code-name-astoria.aspx

Project Codename “Jasper”, aka Dynamic ADO.NET is a set of extensions to the ADO.NET Entity Framework designed to enable iterative (repeated loops) and agile development of powerful, real world data driven applications. Built atop the ADO.NET Entity Framework, Jasper supports rich queries and complex mapping, and allows users to interface by naming controls according to their models without worrying about binding code.