Data Services Client for Win Phone 7 Now Available!

 

Today, at the PDC, we announced that a production-ready version of the WCF Data Services client for Windows Phone 7 is available for download from https://odata.codeplex.com.  This means that it is now simple to create an app that connects your Windows Phone 7 to all the existing OData services as well as the new ones we’re announcing at this PDC.

The release includes a version of System.Data.Services.Client.dll that is supported on the phone (both the assembly and the source code) and a code generator tool to generate phone-friendly client side proxies

The library follows most of the same patterns you are already used to when programming with OData services on the desktop version of Silverlight.  The key changes from Silverlight desktop to be aware of are:

  • LINQ support in the client library has been removed as the core support is not yet available on the phone platform.  That said, we are actively working to enable this in a future release.  Given this, the way to formulate queries is via URIs.
  • We’ve added a LoadAsync(Uri) method to the DataServiceCollection class to make it simple to query services via URI.
  • So you can easily support the phone application model we’ve added a new standalone type ‘DataServiceState’ which makes it simple to tombstone DataServiceContext and DataServiceCollection instances

 

Mike Flasko

Lead Program Manager, Microsoft