We’re pleased to announce that today we are releasing NuGet packages and a tools installer for WCF Data Services 5.2.0. As mentioned in the prerelease blog post, this release brings in the UriParser from ODataLib Contrib and contains a few bug fixes.

Bug Fixes

This release contains the following noteworthy bug fixes:

• Fixes an issue where code gen for exceedingly large models would cause VS to crash (you need to run the installer to get this fix)
• Provides a better error message when the service model exposes enum properties
• Fixes an issue where IgnoreMissingProperties did not work properly with the new JSON format
• Fixes an issue where an Atom response is unable to be read if the client is set to use the new JSON format

URI Parser

In this release ODataLib now provides a way to parse $filter and $orderby expressions into a metadata-bound abstract syntax tree (AST). This functionality is typically intended to be consumed by higher level libraries such as WCF Data Services and Web API.

For a detailed write-up on $filter and $orderby parsing, see this blog post.

General Reliability and Performance

In addition, we’ve invested a little bit more in improving the overall stability and performance of WCF Data Services. While we recognize that we have continued room for improvement, we are actively investing here and will continue to invest in reliability and performance over the next several releases.

What do you need to do?

This release is a little unusual because we fixed bugs in both code gen and the runtime. Most customers should run the installer, which will fix the code gen bug and ensure that new WCF Data Services are created with the other fixes in 5.2.0. If you are only authoring services and you use NuGet to update your dependencies, simply updating to 5.2.0 is sufficient to get the rest of the fixes. (Note, however, that if you don’t run the installer all new services will need to be updated to get the other fixes in 5.2.0.)

What do you think?

As always, we love it when our customers stay on the latest releases and give us feedback about what works, what needs to be improved, and what’s outright broken. If you have any feedback related to this release, please leave a comment below or e-mail me at mastaffo@microsoft.com.