14 DAY TRIAL // An updated version of the WCF Data Services is now available for early adopters leveraging OData in their .NET Framework 4 or Silverlight 4 projects. The WCF Data Services March 2011 Community Technology Preview 2 for .NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4 is live on the Microsoft Download Center, where it’s being offered to testers.
The March 2011 CTP 2 is designed to give developers a taste of the evolution of WCF Data Services compared to the version of the libraries that shipped with .NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4.
Obviously, the updated CTP2 release brings to the table a number of enhancements, among which Relationship Links, Multi-Value properties and EntitySet Resolver.
“The WCF Data Services client and server libraries have been extended to represent the URIs that allow the client to address the relationships between related entities.
“The WCF Data Services client and server libraries have been extended to represent small unordered groupings of non-nullable primitive or complex types.
“Previous versions of the WCF Data Services client library assumed that all entity sets reside under the same service root. This release updates the client library to allow the client to resolve entity sets to different URIs,” Microsoft stated.
WCF Data Services is the evolution of the ADO.NET Data Services, offered to developers building Open Data Protocol (OData) services based on .NET Framework.
Microsoft underlines that WCF Data Services March 2011 CTP 2 for .NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4 is nothing more than a pre-release build and should not be deployed into production.
The software giant also enumerated the following additional enhancements in CTP2:
“Prefer header: The WCF Data Services client and server libraries have been extended to enable a client to state whether or not it would like the server to include a response payload for PUT, MERGE or POST operations. This is modeled after the HTTP Prefer RFC.
“Support for new HTTP method (PATCH): With this update, the WCF Data Services client and server libraries now support the verb PATCH in addition to MERGE. The core semantics of PATCH and MERGE are very similar.
“Properties on derived types: 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.”
WCF Data Services March 2011 CTP2 also allows developers to customize their feed updates, through the introduction of support for Entity Property Mapping.
Entities can now have associated multiple named streams, with devs no longer limited by Media Link Entry capable of representing just a single one stream for each entity.
WCF Data Services March 2011 Community Technology Preview 2 (CTP2) for .NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4 is available for download here. Silverlight 4 is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.