14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has wrapped up a project designed to make it easy for developers using Team Foundation Server 2010 to leverage an OData service.
Appropriately dubbed OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010 (v1.0), the sample can be downloaded free of charge from the Redmond company.
Softpedia readers were first informed of OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010 in April 2011, when Microsoft released a Beta development milestone and invited testers to try it out.
Brian Keller, Microsoft sr. technical evangelist for Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management, explained that Microsoft focused on perfecting OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010 for release, as well as improving the guidance available for devs.
“Since the beta, we have invested heavily in better documentation and a better installation experience. We have also made a few bug fixes and added support for a few operations, mainly around build definitions. Everything we have done since the beta has been based on direct customer feedback,” he revealed.
The tool makes it simple for developers to extend Team Foundation Server 2010 to a range of devices, and work with TFS data on anything from tablets and smartphones to the Windows PC.
Similar in some ways to REST, OData is a standard used to work with data over the web from devices and applications that play nice with HTTP.
Keller stressed that while this is the final version of OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010 and not just a pre-release Build, it’s not an official solution from the TFS engineering team.
“The TFS engineering team has reviewed the service and approved of the approach we are taking, but there is no official support for this service. That said, all of the source code is provided for you, the license permits you to use it and extend it for your own purposes, and we are interested in (but not committed to) continuing to add capabilities over time,” he added.
OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010 - v1 is available for download here.