Ever since the ADO.NET team started development on Astoria (pre-release), I have loved the concept.  Since its release (it was called ADO.NET Data Services and is now WCF Data Services), I’ve used it a ton (you may remember the example from this post).  Back at MIX10, Microsoft announced a commitment to the Open Data Protocol (OData).  WCF Data Services enables you to create services that use OData to expose and consume data, both with .NET 4 and .NET 3.5 SP1.  OData services are very powerful and there are quite a few live producers such as Netflix and Nerd Dinner.

OData is so powerful because it’s REST based and you can access the services from just about everywhere, including just a simple URL.  For example, using the Netflix OData service to access the best movie ever made by title: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=Name eq 'Office Space'.  Pretty simple.  Of course accessing things solely based on URLs in code isn’t the best, and hence the reason for my post.

Client Libraries

When using OData, it’s convenient to utilize an SDK to access the services.  For example, in Silverlight you can access OData services using LINQ.  There’s also a fantastic AJAX Library (which I used in a previous post).  There are SDKs for PHP, Objective-C, and many others, but there was one missing that I wanted to use… Ruby.  I am assuming this comes as no surprise given my new found love for Ruby.   More...

A little over a month ago, Microsoft released the fourth preview of ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX.  This is the new release of the Microsoft AJAX Framework that will be released with ASP.NET 4.0.  We’re getting closer to the RTM release of .NET 4.0 (hopefully later this year), so I figured this would be a good time to start posting about ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX.  There are some very exciting things coming along with ASP.NET 4.0, and the ASP.NET AJAX component is no exception.  The best news about ASP.NET AJAX is that you can start using it today without having to wait for the full blown ASP.NET AJAX framework.  Keep in mind that these components are still in "preview" mode (meaning no Microsoft support), though they are usable at your own risk.  For more information, you can check out the license on CodePlex.

In this post, I’ll be talking about the client templates that can be found in the latest release.  Client templates are very powerful.  They are a key component for rich client-side applications.  Up until now, I have been using jTemplates, a client template solution plugin for jQuery.  If you aren’t familiar with jTemplates, check out Dave Ward’s article “Use jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX to build a client side Repeater.”  jTemplates is really a nice plugin, but it’s a bit disconnected from the flow of the page.  Enter ASP.NET 4.0 AJAX and the DataView control. More...