Using Telerik’s new LINQ Implementation Part I: Automatic Styles

Last week Telerik released a service pack for OpenAccess Q1. The service pack fixes a few issues with Telerik’s new LINQ implementation working under Visual Studio 2010. In addition, the service pack shipped the Data Services Wizard; the Data Service Wizard is no longer a separate install. You can use the Data Service Wizard with traditional OpenAccess classes or the new LINQ implementation. Today I will show show you a new feature of the wizard: automatically creating a styled Silverlight application from your domain model. Future blog posts will show how to use RIA Services as well as SQL Azure.

To get started open up Visual Studio 2010 and create a new ASP.net application. Create a new domain model by right clicking on the project and say Add|New Item and choose Telerik OpenAccess Domain Model from the dialog.

This will bring up the OpenAccess ORM Data Wizard to create your domain model by mapping tables to entities. Let’s use Northwind and map all tables and use the default model name: NorthwindEntityDiagrams. While there are other advanced features of the wizard, like T4 templates to override the default codegen, let’s just accept the defaults and finish.

Once you click Finish the wizard will add a new domain model to your project.

Now that we have our domain model, it is time to run the Data Services Wizard to automatically create the a RESTful service using WCF Data Services. (The data service wizard also gives us the ability to create a WCF endpoint as well.) This can be done from the Telerik|Data Services Wizard menu option from the Visual Studio main menu (or right clicking on the EntityDiagrams1.rlinq file.) The first page of the wizard asks you where the domain model lives and what project to place the new service in. We’ll do it all in the same project.

The next page of the wizard asks you what entities you want to expose in your service as well as if you want to generate a Silverlight Application. If you check this you are given the option to use the standard Microsoft Silverlight controls or the Telerik controls (if you have them installed.) If you choose the Telerik controls, you will also be able to choose a theme for your Silverlight application. The drop down will show you a list of all of the installed themes. I’ll go ahead and choose the Windows7 theme.

After you click through the finish page of the wizard, the next step is to hit F5 and run your application. A basic, but styled, Silverlight application is created for you, getting you started with all of the CRUD methods. The Telerik version has all of the features your would expect, built in sorting and filtering, grouping, etc. I know that you will want to change the baseline application, but this is a great start, eliminating all of the asynchronous CRUD code that you have to write. Not bad for about 30 seconds of work!

Enjoy!