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Announcing WCF Data Services June 2011 CTP for .NET4 & SL4

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Today we are releasing June CTP of the next version of the WCF Data Services libraries targeting.NET 4 and Silverlight 4.  Based on broad community feedback, in addition to features shipped as part of Oct 2010 CTP1, I’m happy to announce that this release includes two of the top three requested features by WCF Data Services developers; support for properties on derived types & support for Any/All LINQ operators.

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 how to use each.

Properties on derived types:  The WCF Data Services framework is designed to make it possible to expose a model that has inheritance hierarchy for the entities in the model however a current limitation is that only operations on properties that exist on the base type, associated with the set, are supported. This feature has been among our customers top asks since the lack of support makes exposing models with rich, well-defined inheritance hierarchies impossible to do. To enable such scenarios WCF Data Services now supports both exposing and consuming models which have properties (primitive, complex & navigation) defined on subtypes of the base type associated with the set.

Any/All:  One of our customers top asks has been increasing the expressiveness of WCF Data Services queries to be able to express questions/queries like ‘are there any customers which have no orders’ or ‘are there any customers who only spend more than $100 at our shop’. In this release we added support for  ‘any’ and ‘all’ canonical functions that can be used to ask these sorts of questions and can be invoked via the WCF Data Services client LINQ support.

OData Library: As part of this release we are releasing a low level OData serializer/deserializer library that can be used in client or server stacks. The currently released library include support for serializing ATOM & JSON formats as well as deserializing JSON format.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What are the prerequisites?

A1: See the download center page for a list of prerequisites, supported operating systems, etc.

Q2: Does this CTP install side-by-side with March CTP that is currently on my development machine?

A2: No, side-by-side installation for these CTPs is not recommended. If the Data Services June 2011 CTP and the Data Services March 2011 CTP are installed on the same machine, Add Service Reference in Visual Studio will use the Data Services June 2011 CTP to generate the service reference in projects using either the March 2011 or June 2011 versions of the Data Services assembly.  Please uninstall the Data Services March 2011 CTP before installing the Data Services June 2011 CTP. If you already have both CTPs installed, please uninstall both and then reinstall the Data Services June 2011 CTP.

Q3: Does this CTP install side-by-side with the .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 versions that are currently on my development machine?

A3: By in large this install is side-by-side with existing .NET4 and SL4 bits; however, that was not possible in all cases so some VS files will be modified by the CTP installer to enable the Add Service Reference gesture in Visual Studio 2010 to make use of the new features in this CTP.  The files should be replaced to their original state during uninstall of this CTP. 

Q4: Does this CTP include support for Windows Phone 7?

A: No, you can download the Windows Phone 7 SDK, which includes the OData client, from here. The Windows Phone 7 client does not yet support new features like properties on derived types.

Giving Feedback

The following forum is dedicated to providing feedback on "pre-release" versions of data services such as this CTP: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dataservices/threads.  Please direct all your questions about the release to this forum. 

Note: The forum intended for questions on currently shipping versions of ADO.NET Data Services is still available at: (https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/adodotnetdataservices/threads  ).

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the release!

Ahmed Moustafa
Program Manager
WCF Data Services

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 08, 2011
    I see a very manageable number of questions on the pre-release forums, but nobody answering them. Are you guys sure you are looking for feedback?

  • Anonymous
    July 18, 2011
    Are you guys looking at the Pre-Release Forum? Why no responses?

  • Anonymous
    July 18, 2011
    Hi, Is reference data caching also available with this ? If not what happend to that? there is no way we can perfor, sync from silverlight

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2011
    Hi, I get this exception. Please help me to solve this problem (then I switch to 4.0 WCF everything works ok, problem appears only in CTP) 'System.InvalidOperationException: There is a type mismatch between the client and the service. Type 'Crm.Objects.Departament' is not an entity type, but the type in the response payload represents an entity type. Please ensure that types defined on the client match the data model of the service, or update the service reference on the client. at System.Data.Services.Client.Ato'

  • Anonymous
    September 02, 2011
    Hi,  when is the RC / RTM for WCF Data Services 4 going to drop? Thanks Toby

  • Anonymous
    October 04, 2011
    I would echo Toby's question (about when will this be released). The first CTP for this version came out a year ago (Oct 26th 2010).  How long are you planning on releasing CTPs before you release some of the features for us to use?  (Most companies frown on using CTPs in production.) Or are you waiting to release "in band" with Visual Studio 11?

  • Anonymous
    October 13, 2011
    I think I have a good guess about the release of WCF Data Service's support of OData V3. It will be released with .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 11 (obviously there is no date on that). This guess comes from the EF side of things.  In the comments on the blog post for RC 4.2 they mention that their June 2011 CTP stuff is going to wait for .NET 4.5.  Because WCF Data Service's support of OData V3 is dependent on the changes in that CTP (and they have CTPed together in the past) I am going to guess that they both will wait for the .NET 4.5 release. Thank you to the EF team for not ignoring the users when we ask release related questions.  (Hint hint...)

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2012
    The comment has been removed