After a great beta cycle, Telerik is proud to announce today the commercial availability of the OpenAccess Data Service Wizard. You can download it and install it with Telerik OpenAccess Q1 2010 for both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 RTM. If you are new to the Data Service Wizard, it is a great tool that will allow you to point a wizard at your OpenAccess generated data access classes and automatically build an WCF, Astoria (WCF Data Services), REST or ATOMPub collection endpoint, complete with the CRUD methods if applicable.
If you are familiar with the Data Service Wizard already, there will be two new surprises in the release version.
If you generated a domain model with the new OpenAccess Visual Entity Designer, you have only one file added to your project, mydomainmodel.rlinq for example. The first surprise of the new Data Service Wizard is that if you right click on the domain model in Visual Studio, you can use an “express” version of the Data Service Wizard and generate your service with just one click! This is pretty awesome, you can create your domain model from a database and create a service in well under 60 seconds.
Surprise number two is that if you are using the new Visual Entity Designer, we now give you the option, in both the full wizard and the right-click “express” version to create a new Silverlight application as a consumer of your new service. The Wizard will generate a Silverlight application with the full CRUD methods for you. You can go from File|New Project in Visual Studio to a full domain model generated from the database, a full WCF or Astoria service, and a fully functional CRUD Silverlight client in under 60 seconds!
The Silverlight application generation feature is a very “1.0” feature and we have big plans for it moving forward. We will look forward to your feedback as what to add to this application generation feature next. While I expect you to put your own skin on it and write some validation code, the application we build for you is a great starter and will save you from having to write all of the asynchronous CRUD code in your client. Visit our forums and let us know what you think.
Lastly, when OpenAccess releases its Q1 Service Pack later this month, the Data Service Wizard will be part of the main product install, so there is no need for a separate install moving forward. Our release cycle will now be in sync with OpenAccess and we have a lot planned for Q2, I will post an updated roadmap here soon.
Stephen Forte sits on the board of several start-ups including Triton Works. Stephen is also the Microsoft Regional Director for the NY Metro region and speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development including Programming SQL Server 2008 (MS Press).