WCF Data Services 5.0 for OData v3 is out today. Read all about it here , and get it while it's hot. Actions , geospatial support , and an assortment of other goodies, not the least of which is support for Any and All operators. This restriction has been around for a long time , and it's great to see...

As you can see from the recent March 2011 CTP of WCF Data Services , OData continues to evolve. While the post includes information about changes to the WCF Data Services implementation, I'm very excited to see that the protocol is also very much alive and well. From the first bulleted list, here...

This post is a simple overview of namespaces you will run into when working with OData in the ATOM format. The list is not comprehensive, but you can get pretty far with it. http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom This is the Atom namespace, defined in RFC 4287 . It's used for all "regular" ATOM things like entry...

Mike posted an announcement yesterday on the WCF Data Services blog. Go get the goodies from http://odata.codeplex.com/ today and start writing your connected phone apps!

As you probably already know, SharePoint has great support for OData, providing access to lists, documents and all sorts of goodies. I always seem to forget how the link to the OData endpoint is constructed, though. So I created this short bookmarklet that does the trick. Just navigate to a SharePoint...

The last entry of Consuming OData with Office VBA series had a small glitch - one of the helper functions is missing. The code isn't too tricky to write, but it's a handy little thing to have in your VBA toolkit. It simply takes a collection of dictionaries, and returns a new collection with all the...

Add feature requests or vote for existing ones over at http://dataservices.mswish.net/ . The WCF Data Services team is listening - make your voice heard! Enjoy! PS: gotta love the 'mswish.net' domain name

Yes, our WCF Data Services blogging hero has gone and done it again - this time, the topic is expansions . Some of the highlights: What expansions look like for custom providers. Why there is nothing funny in the expression tree when using LINQ to Objects directly. Enjoy!

A few days ago I came upon a question about how decimal values are encoded in JSON payload in an OData response. The value was in quotes rather than as a numeric literal, so a script running in a browser found a string where the developer thought a number would be found. I confirmed that this is indeed...

In case you missed it, you should read Vitek's post on Projection Data Service Expressions . Here you will get not just the basics of his this works, but also details as to: Why we may query for more properties than those strictly projected. Why ProjectedWrappers are used, how they're used, and why you...

Today, just a historical note on why these methods are named as they are. What we needed when designing this a few years ago was a way to set at a basic level what kind of access we would provide from the service, preferably in a uniform manner. There are tricky issues to deal with when permissions and...

Today, a simple link to OData, O How I Love Thee , with a nice review of how OData, WCF Data Services, ADO.NET Entity Framework and jQuery can all be better together. Enjoy!

So, the OData Protocol talks about custom query options , but how exactly do you use them from the WCF Data Services client? If you've used service operations at all, you already know the answer: use the AddQueryOption method. There is a subtle difference though, and things are actually easier for custom...

There is a Consuming OData Feeds from a Workflow topic up on MSDN that walks you through the steps of adding a reference to an OData server and building an activity for it that you can then use in your workflows. With full asynchronous support and everything - pretty impressive for a walkthrough. One...

Vitek has another great post in his series over at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vitek/archive/2010/06/16/data-services-expressions-part-6-key-lookup.aspx . There are a couple of things that I think are worth calling out. The provider doesn't know if it needs to produce many items or just one . It can figure...

As I wrote about a while ago, quantifiers such as 'any' and 'all' are not supported in WCF Data Services . One way to work around this if you have some specific need is to create a service operation, which is what we'll walk through today. The Scenario I'm going to write a small WCF Data Service...

The Data Services team blog has begun a series on OData and Authentication. Parts one and two are up. Obviously authentication is an important matter in real-life services, so this is going to be pretty nifty to have. Enjoy!

One of the capabilities that I wanted to call out of WCF Data Service projections on the client is the ability to include expanded entities. So I can write something like the following, which returns the ID, LastName and manager's ID and LastName for each employee. This is just a Northwind database...

The MSDN documentation on the topic does a pretty good job at giving you a high-level view of what happens when you use select to do a projection of the query results, and calls out a number of things that aren't supported when projecting entity types. It looks like projecting into anonymous types is...

About two years ago, I put up a post discussing how exceptions are streamed in WCF Data Services (called ADO.NET Data Services at the time). Today I want to continue from yesterday's post and discuss how the client implements support for this, but first a quick note. I'd like to make sure I clarify...

If you've spent any time looking at the new Open Data Protocol Client Libraries on CodePlex, you may have run into the internal XmlWrappingReader class. I'll look into why this was a useful thing to have and what important OData processing aspect it helps with in the future, but for today I want to touch...

This has got to be one of the most exciting announcements in a while. The source code for the .NET Framework and Silverlight client libraries is available from the CodePlex site. Check out the announcement and bask in the open-ness. Over the next few posts, I'll drill into some interesting behaviors...

Peter has a great write-up about this , so I won't go into much detail here. Go read his post, then come back for a bit more context. You have always been able to get a data service to process requests using a specific URI as the root. The data service doesn't have some magic knowledge about where...

I mentioned a little while ago that I was going to cover the DataServiceProviderMethods class. It's a mysterious class, where all methods simply throw a NotImplementedException. You can't subclass to implement the members, you can't provide a hook to provide an implementation. What is this thing doing...

If you've read the post on the new types available in the System.Data.Services.Providers namespace , you might have jumped in and tried to write your own metadata provider for some not-quite-there interesting data model. Not for the faint of heart, but certainly an exercise that will increase your understanding...