Douglas Purdy

The OData team is hiring developers and testers.

https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&so=&rw=1&jid=15692&jlang=EN

https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&so=&rw=1&jid=11878&jlang=EN

Kent has a version of the MIX Day 2 Keynote with just the “Services Powering Experiences” section posted on the Data DevCenter.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ff191185.aspx

WCF Data Services supports two data sources out of the box:  an EF data source and a CLR data source.

This lets you expose an OData service from any database that supports EF as well as arbitrary CLR objects.

There are many reasons to need more than this, particularly if your data is not relational or you can’t afford to have CLR types floating around all over the place.

A canoncial example of this scenario is the SharePoint data model.

In order to support SharePoint, we adedd a dynamic data source provider model that we call IDSP internally.

This provider model consists of a number of interfaces that you can use to expose any data source as an OData service.

One of the PMs on the WCF Data Services team, AlexJ, is blogging about this at now.

http://blogs.msdn.com/alexj/archive/2010/01/04/creating-a-data-service-provider-part-1-intro.aspx

Worth checking out…

The WCF team just released REST Starter Kit, Preview 2.

The coolest features are “Paste as XML Serializable Type” and the “HttpClient” (I don’t know what the official names are these days).

Yes, I have talked about these two things before in the Biztalk Services SDK, but now they are written by real engineers and we are giving out the source.

If you have always wanted “dots” over your XML data from a REST service, PXS is the best thing since sliced bread.