Today we are releasing CTP1 of the next version of the WCF Data Services libraries.  This release targets .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 and includes new client and server features in addition to those that shipped as part of .NET 4 & SL4.  With this CTP, you can now use the WCF Data Services client to talk to your Windows Live resources (P...

We’ve received a fair number of questions regarding our current CTP library for Windows Phone 7 and what our RTM plans are. The goal of this post is to address many of those questions by describing our plans for the coming months…. Background The CTP release of the data services client that is currently available for the phone was an early relea...

Over the weekend the ASP.NET team released a Microsoft Security Advisory about a security vulnerability found in ASP.NET: https://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2416728.mspx The WCF Data Services team looked into the issue and don’t believe there is any additional exposure to the vulnerability beyond what is exposed by ASP.NET. Howev...

As we’ve posted a few times before on this blog the data services team is beginning to explore improvements and new features for our next release.  As part of this process, it’s critical that we hear your feedback, as it helps us ensure that what we build actually meets your requirements in real-world scenarios.  Today we’re launching a n...

In this second post in the series on implementing a streaming data provider, we show how to use the WCF Data Services client library to access binary data exposed by an Open Data Protocol (OData) feed, as well as has how to upload binary data to the data service. For more information on the streaming provider, see the first blog post in this series...

OAuth WRAP is a claims based authentication protocol supported by the AppFabric Access Control (ACS) which is part of Windows Azure. But most importantly it is REST (and thus OData) friendly too. The idea is that you authenticate against an ACS server and acquire a Simple Web Token or SWT – which contains signed claims about identity / roles / ri...

The Open Data Protocol (OData) enables you to define data feeds that also make binary large object (BLOB) data, such as photos, videos, and documents, available to client applications that consume OData feeds. These BLOBs are not returned within the feed itself (for obvious serialization, memory consumption and performance reasons). Instead, this b...

Our goal in this post is to re-use the Forms Authentication already in a website to secure a new Data Service. To bootstrap this we need a website that uses Forms Auth. Turns out the MVC Music Store Sample is perfect for our purposes because: The rest of this post assumes you’ve downloaded and installed the MVC Music St...

You might remember, from Part 5, that Basic Authentication is built-in to IIS. So why do we need ‘Custom’ Basic Authentication? Well if you are happy using windows users and passwords you don’t. That’s because the built-in Basic Authentication, uses the Basic Authentication protocol, to authenticate against the windows user ...

Windows Azure and SQL Azure are the new Cloud service products from Microsoft. In this blog post, I am going to show you how you can take a database that is hosted in SQL Azure and expose it as OData in a rich way using WCF Data Services and Windows Azure. This walk-through requires that you have Visual Studio 2010 and both a Windows Azure and SQ...