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...

If you've read things of mine, such as my Wrox Blox Hands On ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, or posts on the ASP.NET Forums, you may have noticed I talk about using ASP.NET AJAX Page Methods lots of the time.  Lots of developers using ASP.NET AJAX overuse the UpdatePanel, or use it in situations where it doesn't make sense.  One example of this that I explore in my book is the comparison between using an UpdatePanel for a cascading drop-down effect vs. using the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit's CascadingDropDown Control with Page Methods.  In short, the CascadingDropDown was far more efficient.  Most of the time the reasoning for choosing the UpdatePanel is that developers don't "think" about the repercussions of the UpdatePanel, nor do they think about other approaches to the problems they're trying to solve.  One of my favorite posts on UpdatePanels that I constantly refer developers to is Dave Ward's blog post titled "Why ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels Are Dangerous".  The post does a great job of discussing the point of UpdatePanel overuse and gives an example of using Page Methods for a task instead of the UpdatePanel.  Since I still encounter developers who fall into the UpdatePanel trap, I figured it would be a good idea to discuss Page Methods a bit further.

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If you are working with a WCF service, an MSMQ binding, and hosting in IIS, there are three wonderful articles by Tom Hollander that you should check out.  The series is entitled "MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice", here are the three links:

• MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 1)
• MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 2)
• MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 3)

They sure have helped me get one of my projects working, and I'm sure they will help you as well.

It's been entirely too long since my last post, and with the olympics in full swing, we'll go with a volleyball theme for this post.

BUMP

So here's the scenario. After really digging your teeth into ASP.NET 2.0 and playing around wiih all the cool data access features, you decide to apply a liberal use of the ObjectDataSource for its ability to take care of the paging and sorting calls for you. Now, you begin to convert your site to a service oriented back end and you wonder how you're going to make calls against your web service. You have a few options in front of you. You can create a thin facade layer that will act as a liaison between your presentation code and your service layer calls, and hook your ObjectDataSource to that. This works especially well when you have a complex object model that makes use of the web service calls behind the scenes. It's also beneficial when you are generating your proxy classes from metadata or contacting a foreign web service. In the scenario I'm going to demonstrate here, I'm referencing a shared contract and service library, so I'll be using using the ObjectDataSource to make direct calls to ChannelFactory<T> for this example.

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