In some of our past posts, we’ve discussed one of the benefits of data services is that the interface to such a service is uniform.  This means that how you interact with each service (issue a query, insert a new entity, etc) is the same across all services regardless of the schema being exposed.  This uniform interface leads to one of the value propositions of data services, which is the ability to create reusable code for service consumption.  That is, one can now write reusable client libraries, LINQ providers, app/UI components, widgets, etc that are able to work across any data service.  Furthermore, since payloads are largely self describing, such reusable artifacts need a relatively small amount of input from the developer.  For example, at MIX 08 we showed a simple AJAX grid control we created that given the root URL of a service and the target entity set (ex. Customers) it could display all customers, enable paging, sorting, relationship traversal, etc. 

So, I said all that to point at this: 

http://blogs.telerik.com/RosenKonstantinov/Posts/08-06-27/RadGrid_Client_Data_Binding_And_ADO_Net_DataServices_example.aspx

This is a blog on the Telerik site we came across the other day that shows some exploring the folks at Telerik are doing around Data Services.

Do you know of another interesting use of data services?  If so, we’d love to hear about it.

-Mike Flasko

Program Manager, ADO.NET Data Services