OData Updates in Windows Phone “Mango”

Today, the Windows Phone team announced the next version of Windows Phone, code-named “Mango.” You can read more about Mango in this morning’s blog post from the Windows Phone team. There is also a developer tools update for this Mango beta release, which now includes the OData client library for Windows Phone; you can get it from here.

Here’s a list of new OData client library functionality in Mango:

• 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.

Note: These enhancements essentially makes the OData client library for Windows Phone functionally equivalent to the WCF Data Services library for Silverlight, which is nice for folks porting Silverlight apps to Windows Phone.

Glenn Gailey