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WCF 5.0 – Vocabularies, Actions And Improved Spatial Support

by Roopesh Shenoy on Apr 17, 2012 |

Microsoft recently announced RTM release of WCF Data Services 5.0 – this includes several new features such as Vocabularies, Actions, new Spatial Primitives and several updates to OData libraries.

The new features are mainly to support the enhancements in OData v3. Following are some of the interesting ones -

Vocabularies – Annotations, mainly to provide richer description (metadata regarding type validations/ranges/display, for e.g.) for data published via OData
Action Providers – a way to inject behavior by describing URIs in the data – sending a request to these URIs can cause some action to be taken. This can also work with Entity Framework.
16 new Spatial Primitives, that enable clients to perform operations on geospatial data in filter, select and orderby clauses
ODataLib now supports serialization and deserialization of all OData payloads
EdmLib - allows to build EDM of a service for OData Serialization/Deserialization, including support for annotations
Support for Any/All Queries (but no Join yet)

The RTM can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download center.

WCF Data Services enables the creation and consumption of OData services. OData protocol is a new data-sharing standard promoted by Microsoft that aims to bridge the disparity between various service providers and consumers and promote interoperability.