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OData improvements for Windows Phone 7

Last week the Windows Phone team announced the beta release of Mango. It contains a long list of exciting new features but one that I was especially interested in are the OData improvements. As we use OData for our TFS Monitor application, I’m happy to see how much easier my life will become. Kind of sad that I have to wait until the fall before I can add this functionality to my application Sad smile

odata

Oh, before I forget, here is the list with the upcoming OData improvements:

  • OData Client Library for Windows Phone Is Included in the Windows Phone SDK
    In this release, the OData client library for Windows Phone is included in the Windows Phone Developer SDK. It no longer requires a separate download.
  • Add Service Reference Integration
    You can now generate the client data classes used to access an OData service simply by using the Add Service Reference tool in Visual Studio. For more information, see How to: Consume an OData Service for Windows Phone.
  • Support for LINQ
    You can now compose Language Integrated Query (LINQ) queries to access OData resources instead of having to determine and compose the URI of the resource yourself. (URIs are still supported for queries.)
  • Tombstoning Improvements
    New methods have been added to the DataServiceState class that improve performance and functionality when storing client state. You can now serialize nested binding collections as well as any media resource streams that have not yet been sent to the data service.
  • Client Authentication
    You can now provide credentials, in the form of a login and password, that are used by the client to authenticate to an OData service.

For more information on these new OData library behaviors, see the topic Open Data Protocol (OData) Overview for Windows Phone in the Mango beta release documentation.

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