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WCF Data Services Client Library and Windows Phone 7 – Next Steps

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We’ve received a fair number of questions regarding our current CTP library for Windows Phone 7 and what our RTM plans are. The goal of this post is to address many of those questions by describing our plans for the coming months….

Background

The CTP release of the data services client that is currently available for the phone was an early release by our team to enable apps to be built and to allow us to validate how much of the data services client experience that we have in SL4 desktop today we could enable on the phone platform. We've been very pleased by the number of people using the library! That said, the phone platform currently doesn't provide the core types required for the data service client LINQ provider to function. The CTP that is currently available has LINQ support via some creative, but insufficient\shaky workarounds.

Going Forward

Ok, given that context, here is what we're currently planning to do: To enable development in the near term, we are going to create a client library that is Windows Phone 7 friendly by removing the LINQ translator from the client. This will be done by adding #ifdefs to our SL4 client code as well as some additional code changes as required. This means you'll get many of the features you are used to from the Silverlight 4 WCF Data Service client library (serialization, materialization, change tracking, binding, identity resolution, etc), but you will need to formulate queries via URI instead of via LINQ. To mitigate the lack of Add Service Reference support in the current version of the tools, we're looking at providing a T4 template (or command line tool) to enable the simple creation of phone-friendly client code generation. We are going to release this phone-friendly version of the data services client library by refreshing the source code for the client which is currently available from: https://odata.codeplex.com site. This way (after the refresh) the source code for the .NET, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 client libraries will be available from the CodePlex site. We are working on this refresh right now and plan to release it as described above by mid-October. All that said, we are actively working with the Windows Phone platform groups to add the features required to enable the client library to support a LINQ-based query experience in future. We're also working on how to enable the Add Service Reference gesture in the phone version of Visual Studio which didn't quite land in the first release due to these other issues.

How to Develop OData-based Apps Now

To get your odata-based app ready for near launch you can develop now with the current CTP. To ensure your code will port to the new release (once it's available) as smoothly as possible be sure not to use LINQ to formulate queries, but instead formulate queries via URI (as per the guidance below). To put this in class name terms, stay away from using the DataServiceQuery class or anything methods that require that type as a parameter.

 

-Mike Flasko

Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2010
    There is plenty of time to finish the job. No release dates for WP7 have been announced.
  • Anonymous
    October 22, 2010
    So, is it mid-October yet? (hint hint)