WCF Data Services

It often becomes difficult (if not painful) to share data beyond its original intent. As systems continue to become more interconnected, the need to reuse information also grows and the value of any given data becomes greater the more it can be shared and accessed by other systems.

The Open Data Protocol, referred to as OData, is a new data-sharing standard that breaks down silos and fosters an interoperative ecosystem for data consumers (clients) and producers (services) that is far more powerful than currently possible. WCF Data Services, is the Microsoft technology to support the Open Data Protocol. Microsoft now also supports OData in SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Azure Storage, Excel 2010 (through PowerPivot), and SharePoint 2010.

In addition to client libraries that simplify working with OData, the Data Services framework builds on the general WCF capabilities to provide a solution for creating OData services for the web. Data Services enable you to expose data models to the Web in a RESTful way, with rich built-in data access capabilities such as flexible querying, paging, and association traversal.

The Data Services framework facilitates the creation of flexible data services that are naturally integrated with the web. WCF Data Services use URIs to point to pieces of data and use simple, well-known formats to represent that data, such as JSON and ATOM (XML-based feed format). This results in the data service being surfaced as a REST-style resource collection that is addressable with URIs and with which agents can interact using standard HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT or DELETE.

For examples and quick start guides on WCF Data Services, go to this link. Also, read more about OData protocol here.