OData
Create and consume RESTful APIs in a simple and standard way
Latest posts
Using the Silverlight 4.0 WCF Data Services Client Library
Recently Microsoft released Silverlight 4 Beta which includes an update to the Data Services Silverlight client. The update includes most of the new features previewed in the ADO.NET Data Services CTP2 - see this blog post for a complete list of the features in CTP2. The new Silverlight 4.0 Data Services client library also includes improvements to the databinding feature to make binding in an asynchronous environment easier and enhanced support for cross-domain calls in Silverlight. The Silverlight 4.0 beta can be downloaded here - Silverlight 4.0 is designed to be used with Visual Studio Beta 2 only which can ...
Data Services Release Plan Update
We’ve heard a lot of feedback since we first discussed our plans to create v1.5 of Data Services (http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/archive/2009/03/01/announcing-ado-net-data-services-v1-5-ctp1.aspx). Since that time we’ve been busy improving the quality of the product, adding features and solidifying our release plans. The remainder of this post discusses our target release plan for the next version of Data Services and when the final bits will be available. One area we heard consistent feedback on was the desire to limit the number of Data Service releases where possible. T...
Introducing the Microsoft Open Data Protocol Visualizer (CTP1)
1. Introduction The Open Data Protocol Visualizer for Visual Studio CTP1 (“the visualizer”) is a extension that provides a read-only visualization of the types, properties, associations, and other objects in the Entity Data Model (EDM) returned from an Open Data Protocol’s metadata endpoint (this document assumes basic familiarity with the EDM). For instructions on how to create a data service, see here. This blog post uses a slightly modified version of a model reverse-engineered from part of the Northwind database. For general purposes, the AdventureWorks sample database, or any other database you cho...
Simplifying our n-tier development platform: making 3 things 1 thing
As you’ve probably observed, we’ve been working hard over the past year or so to grow our application stacks to better support the types of applications (Silverlight, rich desktop, AJAX, etc) and services (SOAP, REST, etc) that are required to build modern, robust solutions. At present, a few of the technologies we have to help in building services & n-tier applications are: Windows Communication Foundation, .NET RIA Services and ADO.NET Data Services. We’ve been very pleased to see each of these stacks be well received in the community and, given that positive feedback, we’ve been eagerly workin...
Breaking Down ‘Data Silos’ – The Open Data Protocol (OData)
A few weeks ago we posted about steps we’ve been taking to enable a wide range of data sources (DB, SharePoint, Reports, Cloud storage services, etc) to expose their data for programmatic access from any platform (Java, PHP, Silverlight, .NET, AJAX, etc) using a simple HTTP/AtomPub based protocol as the means of communication. Our exploration in the area of data sharing has been driven by frustration we’ve observed in the broader community around the fact that data tends to exist in horizontal or vertical silos: it can be shared within a particular environment but often becomes difficult to use beyond its o...
Enabling X-Domain access to your Data Services
In the Astoria V1.5 CTP2 release, we introduced support for X-Domain and Out Of Browser access to Data Services in our Silverlight client library. This blog post talks about how to enable Cross-Domain access to Data Services from the Silverlight client library. I am a Service author, How do I enable X-Domain access to Data Services I host in my applications? You would need to deploy a ClientAccessPolicy.xml file to enable X-Domain and Out Of Browser access to Data Services hosted by your applications. The CAP.xml file should be deployed at the root of the Web Server hosting the Data Services and should not...
Using Data Services over SharePoint 2010 – Part 2 – CRUD
In part 1 you learned how to get SharePoint 2010 and Astoria working together, how to add a Service Reference to your Client Application and how to do a basic insert. In this installment you will see full CRUD, so you’ll learn how to do queries, data binding, updates and deletes. The Problem: In part 1 we created a ‘Make a Suggestion’ feature for a department Line of Business application, by storing suggestions in SharePoint 2010. Now we need a little Silverlight application for reviewing all those suggestions and making comments on them. So we need to display interesting suggestions, to allow the user to provid...
Using Data Services over SharePoint 2010 – Part 1 – Getting Started
ADO.NET Data Services 1.5 and SharePoint 2010 allow developers to write applications against SharePoint Lists using the familiar Data Services Client programming model. Setup The SharePoint 2010 beta will become generally available in November. In order to use Data Services with SharePoint 2010 Beta, ADO.NET Data Services 1.5 must be installed on your server, ideally *before* you install SharePoint 2010. If however SharePoint 2010 is already on your box when you install Data Services, you will need an iisreset to make the Data Service Endpoint show-up. And then to program against a Data Services enabled SharePo...
Share your data across data sources (Sharepoint, SQL Server, Azure, Reporting Services, etc) & applications (.NET, Silverlight, Excel, etc) using Data Services
This week at the SharePoint conference, Pablo Castro will be announcing that the next version of SharePoint natively integrates with data services such that all SharePoint lists will be exposed as an ADO.NET Data Service. This means you can now program against SharePoint list data using all the VS tools and runtime client libraries (.NET, Silverlight, AJAX, Java, PHP, etc…) which support ADO.NET Data Services. Also, since the Data Service interface is just plain HTTP and XML/Atom or JSON, pretty much any environment with an HTTP stack can now browse, update and interact with list and document data in ...