New Telerik OpenAccess Data Services Wizard CTP

We are proud to announce our December CTP of the Telerik OpenAccess Data Services Wizard (formerly known as the WCF Services Wizard). The Data Services Wizard (DSW) allows you to easily create a CRUD data service layer for your application. The DSW does this by using a data access layer already built by OpenAccess and automatically generating the C# code for your endpoints. The types of endpoints you can create are:

• WCF Data Services (FKA Astoria and also FKA ADO. NET Data Services)
• Raw WCF endpoints
• WCF REST Collection endpoints
• WCF ATOMPub endpoints

This version of the Data Service Wizard is very robust; we have made lots of changes based on your feedback. Our #1 piece of feedback from customers has been to integrate the DSW with OpenAccess and Visual Studio. I am proud to announce that in this version the DSW is fully integrated with Visual Studio!

We have also started to integrate the DSW into the OpenAccess product itself. No longer is the DSW a standalone product; the wizard is now  located under the “Telerik” menu in Visual Studio and looks like the other OpenAccess wizards. Integration will get tighter in the near future and soon just be part of OpenAccess proper, not a separate download.

The basics of the wizard are the same. The DSW will ask you which project your OpenAccess entities are located in and then which entities you will expose in your endpoint.

After you choose the entities you want to expose and what type of service you want to build (WCF, Astoria, etc), you can preview the code that is generated.

A major improvement with the December CTP is that you can now automatically insert these service endpoint files into a project, eliminating the manual step of copying them on over. This will make building the services so much easier!

Go grab the wizard here. It is still considered a Telerik Labs project, but we will move it to a fully supported beta in January with our next build. On the dock for the next build (early January) are:

1. Using T4 Code generation instead of text templates
2. VB.NET code generation
3. Add WCF Data Services 1.5 full integration (using the new Data Service Provider)
4. Prevent the generation of complex entities for all services

Future versions of the product will be fully part of OpenAccess and will also support RIA Services, Azure Services, and Visual Studio 2010 and WCF 4.0. Download today and send us feedback!