OData
Create and consume RESTful APIs in a simple and standard way
Latest posts
Additional Feed Customization Support
1. Problem: In the previous version, WCF Data Services introduced the feed customization feature. This feature enabled users to map properties to certain elements in the Atom document. As an example, users could map a name property to the Atom title element. This is especially useful for generic feed readers which may not know how to interpret the properties in the content element but understand other Atom elements. The OData protocol, and therefore our implementation, did not allow users to map to the repeating Atom link and category elements. In addition, users...
Named Resource Streams
One of the new WCF Data Services features in the October 2010 CTP is something called Named Resource Streams. Background Data Services already supports Media Link Entries which allows you to associate a single streamed blob with an entry. For example, you could have a Photo entry that lists the metadata about the photo and links directly to the photo itself. But what happens though if you have multiple versions of the Photo? Today you could model this with multiple MLEs, but doing so requires you to have multiple copies of the metadata for each version of the stream. Clearly...
Introduction to Multi-Valued Properties
Although you may see both the terms, “Bags” and “Multi-Valued Property”, they refer to the same thing. While this naming change was not included with the latest WCF Data Services 2010 October CTP release, based on community feedback, we’ve decided to use Multi-Valued Property for all future releases. What is a Bag Type? Today entities in WCF Data Services (Customer, Order, etc) may have properties whose value are primitive types, complex types or represent a reference to another entry or collection of entries. However there is no support for properties that *contain* a collection (or Bag) of va...
Data Services Client for Win Phone 7 Now Available!
Today, at the PDC, we announced that a production-ready version of the WCF Data Services client for Windows Phone 7 is available for download from http://odata.codeplex.com. This means that it is now simple to create an app that connects your Windows Phone 7 to all the existing OData services as well as the new ones we’re announcing at this PDC. The release includes a version of System.Data.Services.Client.dll that is supported on the phone (both the assembly and the source code) and a code generator tool to generate phone-friendly client side proxies The library follows most of the same patterns...
Walkthrough: OData client for Windows Live Services
Background As described recently on the Windows Live team blog, programming against your Windows Live artifacts (Calendar, Photos, etc) is now possible using OData. This blog post will walk through how to use our recently released WCF Data Services CTP to interact with the Windows Live OData endpoint. In general the Windows Live OData endpoint is just like any other OData endpoint so the good news is you already pretty much know how to use it J. This post will cover the basics of using some of the new features in our latest WCF Data Services CTP and some of the Windows Live specific aspects you need to know suc...
Announcing WCF Data Services Oct 2010 CTP1 for .NET4 & SL4
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 (Photos, Contacts, Status, etc) who REST endpoints are now OData endpoints – more on that in our next blog post. Below is a brief summary of the features available in this CTP. Subsequent blog posts will discuss each feature in more detail and provide examples of h...
WCF Data Services Client Library and Windows Phone 7 – Next Steps
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 release by our team to enable apps to be built and to allow us to validate how much of the data services client experience that we have in SL4 desktop today we could enable on the phone platform. We've been very pleased by the number of people using the library! That said, t...
ASP.NET Security Vulnerability
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. However, if the WCF Data Service is hosted in ASP.NET, it is quite possible that the vulnerability is present. If any users use the ASP.Net encryption logic to hide sensitive information from the client and use that encrypted data to make decisions in the WCF Data Service, t...
What do you want to see added/changed in WCF Data Services?
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 new site that will allow you to interact more directly with the development team and provide input: https://dataservices.mswish.net . The site’s pretty simple and self-explanatory – you can add a new feature request or vote for feature requests that are already there. W...