Recent Goings on in OData and WCF Data Services
Sorry the blog’s been quiet for so long…I’ve been working on some new stuff that’s not strictly OData, but still very cool and I can’t wait to be able to share it with everyone. It has to do with mobile app development…but you will have to wait another month or so for more info about it.
While I’ve not been so focused strictly on OData, it turns out that there has been a lot going on in the data services world, including:
OData Standardization Submitted to OASIS
Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Progress Software, SAP and WSO2 are jointly submitting a proposal for the standardization of OData to OASIS (more here). To that end, OASIS is forming a technical committee to drive standardization of the OData protocol. For more info or to join the TC (they are closing in 7 days), see the OASIS Open Data protocol (OData) TC page. OASIS has been wanting to get OData for a while now, and this will certainly help drive adoption of OData “in the wild.”
Sweet!
WCF Data Services 5.0.1 Release
True to their planned new semantic versioning model, the OData team at Microsoft has already released WCF Data Services 5.0.1. While mostly containing bug fixes, this version removes v5.0 assemblies from the GAC. More info here. This is a new publishing model for the team, so I expect that things should settle into a nice rhythm after a few cycles.
Update to the OData Client T4 Template
As you may recall from my previous post New and Improved T4 Template for OData Client and Local Database, the OData team is developing their own T4 template that is used to codegen OData clients (using WCF Data Services 5.0). As I mentioned, I really prefer T4 for codegen because it’s very easy to modify, especially compared to the insanely difficult VS codegen APIs. Anyway, there is now an update to the prerelease OData Client T4 template. Sadly, I don’t think I will have the time to port these updates to my Windows Phone storage sample Using Local Storage with OData on Windows Phone To Reduce Network Bandwidth.
WCF Data Services 5.1.0 RC1 Released to NuGet
The RC1 release includes the first preview of JSON light—which will become the default JSON format for OData. This is also the first version of WCF Data Services client that supports JSON (which mobile device developers have been begging for). However, it’s not fully baked yet, so you may want to wait for the next release to try out the client JSON—unless you are OK with writing your own EDMx model resolver.
Cheers,