Astoria V.Next Ships for .NET 3.5 SP1 -> Versioning Issue

The Astoria (aka ADO.NET Data Services) team released an updated .NET 3.5 SP1 version of Astoria last night. This version of Astoria is an inplace update and will overwrite your current version of Astoria (System.Data.Services.*.dll). You can download it from the following locations.

• Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4B710B89-8576-46CF-A4BF-331A9306D555&displaylang=en
• All Previous version of Windows http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=79d7f6f8-d6e9-4b8c-8640-17f89452148e&displaylang=en

The new version of Astoria has some very useful and powerful features. They include projections, data binding, row count, feed customization, server based paging and better BLOB support. There is one small issue, in order to support these new features you have to tell the framework you are using the new version of Astoria. For backward compatibility reasons, by default Astoria will work in “1.0” mode and none of the new features will work out of the box. To take advantage of the 2.0 features, you have to make two minor changes to the InitializeService method:

 1: //change the IDataServiceConfiguration
to DataServiceConfiguration

 2: public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration
config)

 3: {

 4:  config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*",
EntitySetRights.All);

 5:  //take advantage
of the "2.0" features

 6:  config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion
=

 7:  System.Data.Services.Common.DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2;

 8: }

The first thing that you need to change is on line 2, change the interface IDataServiceConfiguration to be just DataServiceConfiguration (I am sure that there is a better way to do this, I have not figured it out yet.). Next, set the MaxProtocolVersion property of DataServiceBehavior to V2. After that you can take advantage of all the new features!

I want to take advantage of my favorite new feature, the inline row count. (I have been asking over and over for this feature, so: Thanks Astoria team!!!) The inline row count will return the number rows in the data feed regardless of paging ($skip, $top etc) as an XML element: <m:count>. This new property makes our RAD Grid and other paging aware controls much easier to perform paging. To make this work, you just add the inlinecount to the querystring:

servicename/entityname?$inlinecount=allpages

Let’s implement this with the example I did the other day using Telerik OpenAccess and the Data Service Wizard. If you remembered I built a simple Astoria 1.0 service exposing the Customers entity. We built this using “Astoria 1.0”, however, I upgraded my machine with the release of Astoria 2.0. When I use inlinecount, I get a 404 error. As with a brand new service, we have to tell the framework what version of Astoria we want to use before we can take advantage of inlinecount. I made the same changes as I did above (DataServiceConfiguration and MaxProtocolVersion ) and reran my application. Now when I type this URL: http://localhost:1191/WebDataService.svc/Customers?$inlinecount=allpages&$top=2

I get only the top two records but the total count of records.

Awesome.

Enjoy Astoria 2.0!

PS:

I thought that this was called “WCF Data Services”? According to the Astoria team blog:

Since this release is an update to the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 we kept the name consistent with what was used in the 3.5 SP1 timeframe so that printed documentation, etc is consistent.  Going forward in .NET 4 and onwards you’ll see us use WCF Data Services.