TNWikiSummit15 Day 2 Presentation: Working with WCF Data Services

Yesterday was a very special day to me, as I did my first ever live online session, and most importantly that’s in one of the biggest events in TechNet Wiki history, the TechNet Wiki Summit 2015.

I am sure, you must have participated at least to one session there. There was a great line up of interesting sessions which was delivered by amazing group of speakers, community leaders, and experts from different countries.

So here is a summary of my session “Working with WCF Data Services”.

Working with WCF Data Services

I have started off with the session showing the Wiki article which my session was based upon. Then I gave a quick snap of what I was planning to deliver in the session.

Agenda

Then I moved ahead following my agenda. Here I have spent some considerable amount of time explaining OData, as it’s the concept behind WCF Data Services. First, I briefly explained what OData is and explained the problem Microsoft tried to resolve by introducing OData. After that, I explained the solution which OData provides as a answer to that particular problem.

Now it was the first demo time. For that I opened up Internet Explorer and showed the OData web site. There I went through OData Ecosystem, showing some Producers and Consumers and then opened up the Nuget Live Service in browser to demo the capabilities of OData Services. There I have used LINQPad to show how this handy tool can be used to run queries against OData Services.

After showing some cool queries against Nuget Live Service (well for me how they got executed is kind of cool!), moved back to the slides. After the demo, hoped the audience must have got some idea of OData. Then I have explained how OData really works. There I have briefly explained the four main parts of OData which are the OData Data Model, OData Protocol, OData Client Libraries and the OData service.

After explaining each of these in detail, now it’s high time to discuss about WCF Data Services. I started explaining what WCF Data Services really is and how it gets connected to OData. Then I explained  WCF Data Services data access layer. There I have gone through Entity Framework Provider, Reflection Provider and the Custom Provider.

Once I completed that, then again it’s demo time.

First I moved ahead with creating a WCF Data Service with Entity Framework Provider. Here I have created a ADO.NET Entity Data Model from Northwind database, and exposed it’s tables through my WCF Data Service. Then I have created an console application showing the different ways to create a GET request to retrieve some data.

After that, I started off with creating a WCF Data Service with Reflection Provider. There I have used a simple POCO class and created a method to retrieve some sample data. Then I have exposed those data through my WCF Data Service.

So that was it. It was almost the time for me to end my session!.

Here is a list of important links.

Links

Introduction to WCF Data Services

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/19019.introduction-to-wcf-data-services.aspx

Demo Code
Download from MSDN Code Gallery

Slide Deck and Video : Available soon.

Finally there wasn’t many listeners as expected, but I am extremely privileged and honored to deliver a session in such an event.

Thank you Durva Ramos Junior, Ed Price, Microsoft and all the TechNet Wiki Ninja’s for all your support and if you want me to do a session in future, please do count me in.

Here is the link to the same article in TechNet Wiki Ninja's blog.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/wikininjas/archive/2015/03/19/tnwikisummit15-day-2-presentation-working-with-wcf-data-services.aspx

Happy Coding.

Regards,
Jaliya