A Few New OData Things of Interest

There are a couple of interesting news items re. OData and WCF Data Services:

WCF Data Services 5.1.0-RC2 is released

The WCF Data Services team continues to work towards shoring-up support for the OData v3 spec, especially on a simplified JSON format.

Highlights of this RC release include the following:

The new “lightweight” JSON format is now the default. This means that OData payloads will look more like payloads in WebAPI (or Windows Azure Mobile Services)—minus the previous bunch of metadata.
In-the-box support for $format and $callback. This is great news for JSON-P folks.
(In Getting JSON Out of WCF Data Services, I discussed to enable JSON-P because WCF Data Services didn’t support the $format query option out-of-the-box.)
Both a NuGet package and a standalone installer.

For the full list of new functionality in this preview release, see Mark’s post WCF Data Service 5.1.0-rc2 Released.

Since nearly the beginning, the OData team has hosted a sample, read-only Northwind feed—exposing the venerable Northwind database to the Web as OData. Now, there is a new read-only sample feed….Derrick VanArnam has published a portion of the (massive) AdventureWorks schema as OData. You can read more about how this sample project was planned and executed on Derrick’s blog Customer Feedback SQL Server Samples, starting with the post AdventureWorks2012 OData service sample – Introduction.

Cheers,