Announcing: WCF Data Services 5.1 Released!

First and most importantly, this morning (November 7th) we uploaded WCF Data Services 5.1 to NuGet. "5.1" is a deceptive version number - this release of WCF Data Services is arguably one of the most important releases as it contains the new JSON (formerly JSON Light) format. We expect this format will become the preferred format for most OData services in the future.

This release also has built-in support for $format and $callback, and some new client-side events for interacting with requests and responses. This release has been eagerly anticipated both inside and outside of Microsoft, with over a thousand downloads of the release candidate packages on NuGet alone.

Learn more about OData on DevRadio

Download the OData SDK for Windows 8

Get official OData resources

OData T4 for C# Preview 1

My colleagues on the WCF Data Services Team have announced OData T4 for C#.

• If you are not already into OData – then you need to consider Odata your solution to simple exposing your data through a queriable service.
• If you are not already into T4 – then you need to consider T4 your code generation solution, completely built into Visual Studio.

I’m very excited to announce the release of OData T4 for C# Preview 1, for the October 2011 CTP of the next version of WCF Data Services libraries, with support for code generation of service operations. The goal of this T4 preview and subsequent ones will be to get community feedback on the templates before having “Add Service Reference” natively generate T4 templates out of the box in a future release.

Read the article here.

Mango Sample: External Data

External Data? Sure; data doesn’t have to be local. Like, some applications are multi-targeted. They allow users to log in on their phone, desktop, tablet, Xbox, work PC, and even fringe technologies like Droid, IPhone, and IPad.
These apps probably persist user info and system data in central stores. And in most cases, they are probably exposed through web services. Let’s take a break from the hard work of UI design and consider the easy task of data access.

Okay, I ended those paragraphs with zingers. Be cool; I’m just playing. These days it’s just me and Visual Studio, and she is so literal. Everything’s a break point to her! Anyway, it’s fun to stray outside the debugger box. I hope this helps.

Step 1: Let’s create a Web Service

EF4 Insert, Update, Delete in a WCF method

Once you have your models created and you are ready to save, the syntax is easy – once you know the syntax. And if you want to see how we do it, the code is [here].

So, we decided to use TT files to build this for us. We’re using the STE (Self-Tracking Entities) referenced in an outside assembly, and that seems to work just fine.

To be honest, I have been quite happy with the Entity Framework – including our decision to dump Data Services and stick to entity-specific CRUD methods on the service tier.

We also noticed that cascade logic seems to be plain-ole automatic. Even when cascades are not enabled within the SQL schema, they appear to work properly as an EF operation. Cool.

To the right, that Ted – and his “Street CRUD”: Create, Read, Update and Delete. My method sample is the CUD part.