Telerik’s new LINQ implementation and MySQL Part II: OData Service and Silverlight App in 30 seconds

About a month or so ago I showed on this blog how to connect to MySQL using Telerik's new LINQ implementation.  Today I will show you how to take it one step further and build an OData service automatically using the Telerik Data Services Wizard. Just for fun, we will also automatically add a full CRUD Silverlight application that consumes the OData service. We’ll do this all in 30 seconds!

To get started, you have to download MySQL 5.x and the MySQL Workbench and also, as my colleague Alexander Filipov at Telerik reminded me, make sure you install the MySQL .NET Connector, which is available here.  I like to use Northwind, ok it gives me the warm and fuzzies, so I ran a script to produce Northwind on my MySQL server. There are many ways you can get Northwind on your MySQL database, here is a helpful blog to get your started.

Let’s get started! First we will just build our model with Telerik’s new LINQ implementation. I will repeat the steps I showed off in this blog post. Start up the Domain Model wizard by right clicking on the project in Visual Studio (I have a Web project) and select Add|New Item and choose “Telerik OpenAccess Domain Model” from the new item list.

When the wizard comes up, choose MySQL as your back end and enter in the name of your saved MySQL connection.

If you don’t have a saved MySQL connection set up in Visual Studio, click on “New Connection” and enter in the proper connection information. *Note, this is where you need to have the MySQL .NET connector installed.

After you set your connection to the MySQL database server, you have to choose which tables to include in your model. Just for fun, I will choose all of them.

Give your model a name, like “NorthwindEntities” and click finish. Now you have a new Telerik Domain Model named NorthwindModel.rlinq.

Now we are going to use the Telerik Data Services Wizard to build our OData service endpoint via WCF Data Services (Astoria) and also automatically build a Silverlight client that will consume this service. The service has full CRUD capability and the Silverlight application is pretty basic, but wires up the application to the service and gives you the hooks to extend on.

We are going to use the “express” version of the Data Service Wizard and build the service and Silverlight client in less than 30 seconds! (Note: I showed how to do this using SQL Server here.) To do this, right click on the NorthwindModel.RLINQ file in the solution explorer and choose from the context menu: Data Services Wizard|Data Services for .NET 3.51 Sp1 Version 2 (Astoria)|Add to Project with new SL Client|WebApplication13.

(Note depending on which version of Visual Studio and what versions of WCF Data Services you have installed on your machine, the choices may vary.)

You will have to click OK to the standard “Add Silverlight Project” screen that Visual Studio gives you, but the wizard does all the work for you. When you run the application, the results are an OData service and a simple Silverlight CRUD application:

Enjoy!