Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone SDK 8.0 were just announced and we are pleased to announce that OData Client Tools for Windows Phone 8 is also now available from the download center.

OData Client Tools for Windows Phone 8 brings OData V3 support to the Windows Phone platform. This release enables you to consume OData V3 services in your Windows Phone application. More specifically, this exciting release extends the Add Service Reference experience with client-side OData support for developing Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 applications using Windows Phone SDK 8.0. The tooling adds references that are capable of consuming OData services up to v3.

How can I get the installer?

You can download the installer for OData Client Tools for Windows Phone 8 from the download center. This release is not included with Windows Phone SDK 8.0 and needs to be installed separately. This release model will enable us to make release updates and fixes for the client tools and runtime components in a more efficient way.

If you don’t install the client tools and start using Add Service Reference to consume an OData service you will be prompted with a message such as the below:

You will need to navigate to the page and click on the OData Client Tools for Windows Phone 8 banner to download and install the client tools.

What are the prerequisites?

OData Client Tools for Windows Phone 8 requires Windows Phone SDK 8.0 to be installed.

In addition, Nuget Package Manager v2.1 is required enable Nuget support for Windows Phone 8 projects. Similar to our other platforms, we are embracing Nuget for the Windows Phone 8 platform as well. If you don’t already have the latest version of the Nuget Package Manager, please make sure to update either from within Visual Studio by navigating to Tools->Extensions and Updates or by downloading and installing from Nuget Package Manager v2.1 download page.

What is in this release?

As mentioned at the beginning, this release brings OData V3 support to Windows Phone platform. You can now write Windows Phone 7.1 and Windows Phone 8 applications using Windows Phone SDK 8.0 and take advantage of exciting OData v3 features like:

• Spatial: You can now take advantage of the spatial support in OData v3 to create location aware OData enabled phone apps
• Actions: You can now invoke actions defined on an OData V3 service.
• Any/All Queries: You can now express queries like “are there any customers which have no orders”
• Vocabularies: You can now consume vocabularies for creating richer experiences on Windows Phone applications
• Properties Defined on Subtypes: You can now have better inheritance support by consuming models which have properties (primitive, complex and navigation) defined on subtypes of the base type associated with the set.
• ODataLib/EdmLib: You can now use these lower level libraries on Windows Phone.

We are very excited with this release and we are looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Let us know what you think and feel free to point us to your OData enabled Windows Phone application.