Announcing the OData SDK

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Last November at PDC 09 we announced the Open Data Protocol (OData), providing a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData makes it easy for data to be shared in a manner that follows the philosophy of Open Data and enables the creation of REST-based data services. These services allow resources identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and defined in an abstract data model, to be published and edited by Web clients using simple HTTP messages. OData enables a new level of data integration across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and tools.

This morning during the Keynote at Mix 2010, Doug Purdy announced the re-launch of OData.org and the release of the OData SDK.

The OData SDK brings together a wealth of resources to help developers participate in the OData Eco-system including:

  • Sample OData online services (northwind, etc) - open a browser and test out an OData Service.
  • OData client libraries
    • Windows Phone 7 series
    • iPhone
    • AJAX\Javascript
    • PHP
    • Java
    • .NET
    • Silverlight
  • Online OData explorer (Source code also available for download from odata.org)
  • Data Service Provider toolkit: Whitepaper and sample WCF Data Services provider implementation to demonstrate how to create a data service over *any* data source
  • OData validation tool: A test harness and a few sample validation tests to make it easy to validate your OData endpoint.  The harness is designed to be easily extended allowing anyone to easily add new tests.

Also announced today at Mix, there are some new OData services available publicly:

  • Netflix has exposed their catalog of movies via OData at https://odata.netflix.com
  • Microsoft codename ‘Dallas’ exposes datasets in the cloud and allows developers to access and monetize them using OData
  • SQL Azure now features an “OData easy button” - a one click experience to get your SQLAzure database exposed as an OData feed

How can you get involved in the OData ecosystem? Check out OData.org – Expose OData – and the next time you’re developing an app ask yourself, is there a feed for that? 

- The OData Team

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2010
    How about a single PDF printable version of all the OData specs? Or at least the individual specs as PDF files? (Some of us prefer dead trees. :-) )
  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2010
    +1 to pdf version of the specs.
  • Anonymous
    March 17, 2010
    Hard to take this too seriously.  Where is the VB6/VBA client library?  What about service libraries?
  • Anonymous
    March 17, 2010
    VB6 is probably unsupported, so they probably won't release a library themselves. But I think one could be made from the specs or other libraries.
  • Anonymous
    March 18, 2010
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 18, 2010
    I see both sides of the VB6 compatibility issue. The problem boils down to thousands of small businessmen who bought or commissioned software years ago that works just fine running on old hardware. Those guys are the least able to financially support our audacious technology advances. They don't see or understand the advantage to buying hardware and software that's obviously several orders of magnitude beyond what they really need to do their business. They see it as technological blackmail, and frankly, I feel bad for them. Sorry to participate in the hijacking of this discussion. I just couldn't resist.
  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2010
    Thats the kind of people that should consider moving to Azure or a similar cloud offer. They don't need to buy new hardware and what not and would pay only for what they actually use.
  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2010
    What about the Compact Framework? Is it planned any support?Thank youFrancesco
  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2010
    oh nice .. :) all i understand that we will be able to select, add, delete and update data with a simple HTTP Request. .. i hope microsoft will not be disabling the previous tools...
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2010
    hope this will help my library 2 work.....
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2010
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2010
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2010
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2010
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2010
    There is nothing stopping the business owners from using the VB6 apps.  However, the decision to use the VB6 apps (and not be forced to upgrade the code) comes with the limitation that they use it under an older OS.  So if they want to stick with their VB6 apps, then they are also stuck with NT4 and Win98.    
  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2010
    Interesting how a post about OData gets turned into a discussion about the viability of keeping VB6 around.No wonder meetings waste so much time.To the poster, thanks for the info, look forward to setting up a playground
  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2010
    Never seen such  preparation needed to do a relatively simple procedure.
  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2010
    Never seen such  preparation needed to do a relatively simple procedure.
  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2010
    more of the same aand I do mean more.
  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2010
    My site has interesting data to share (online TV shows guide), currently via WCF. May I work with one of your experts to add OData?Kind regards,RonSpreety[at]Spreety.com
  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2010
    Hi Ron,send me an email (mike.flasko at microsoft.com) and I'll help you out.-Mike Flasko
  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2010
    I was able to locate the DSPToolkit, but I cannot find the whitepaper...Any ideas where I can get my hands on this?
  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2010
    Oops nevermind...I see it is in the Custom Data Service Providers.html...I was trying to find a .doc or something.Thanks a bunch to the whole OData team.
  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2010
    Oops nevermind...I see it is in the Custom Data Service Providers.html...I was trying to find a .doc or something.Thanks a bunch to the whole OData team.
  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2010
    I can quite happily call Http endpoints from VB6.  There is nothing that OData exposes that is not accessible via VB6 or VBA.
  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2010
    @Bill VB6 apps can still run quite fine under Windows 7 64bit.  I'm not sure why you would think otherwise.
  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2010
    Here is a link to a PDF of the OData specs http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/0/B/B0B199DB-41E6-400F-90CD-C350D0C14A53/[MC-APDSU].pdf
  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2010
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 05, 2010
    re: VB6 - has anyone here ever heard of COBOL?  and thats not meant in a derogatory sense - just a parallel.Software development is about Pragmatism not Idealism.Anyway - does anyone idea what kind of overhead using OData will create? - especially on WCF apps that don't necessarily need an abstract DAL?
  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2010
    Link to the pdf doc.http://bit.ly/dmQkUCcaptcha = 144.  gross!
  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2010
    Heard of COBOL? LOL Not for a while.COmon Business Oriented Language.I programmed in COBOL years ago :)
  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2010
    Well and truly hijacked, could we have some more useful comments about the actual post please.
  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2010
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  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2010
    Why holding out your hand and waiting for someone to deliver to you. Rollup your sleeve and build it on your own. This thread seems like bunch of panhandlers begging for a few lines of code.
  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2010
    What about RDF? It's a W3C standard, it's had a ton of work done on it, and it's provably complete, as in it's sufficient to describe the schema and contents of any data.Why another standard? RDF has had nothing like the impact that it should have, yet, though there are some areas where it's been widely adopted. This seems like an area where MS could really get a serious competative advantage, while playing nice with open standards. (as the did when they made it so easy to write web services in .NET - have you ever seen what you have to do to write them in java?).Almost all the development in RDF/Semantic web is in java. If you'd made it easy to develop semantic web applications in .NET and you would have had a big win, and taken away a really good reason to abandon .NETEverybody loves standards, that's why there are so many of them.
  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2010
    Calm down all you legacy supporters out there...It's a TRIVIAL task to take the .NET libraries and expose as a simplified COM interface.Most legacy languages can easily implement COM interfaces.We specialize in producing many simple COM wrappers to keep old apps alive, people can come to me, but you could easily do it yourself. The 'oldest' app that I have supported in this way recently was a COBAL app.I haven't looked yet, what if the .NET libraries are already support COM?C'mon we're developers."Don't ask someone else to do something that I can easily do myself, only I can customize it to suit my specific domain requirements."
  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2010
    The comment has been removed