Comments

@CmdrTallen

Did you set a page size for the entity set you want to page? Without doing that, SkipCount and TopCount won't be enabled. It's a bug that needs to be fixed.

As far as the v3 part, that is because I was using the CTP version of WCF Data Services in the demo, while the toolkit code on Codeplex isn't.

@Michael

Sorry to hear you're having some issues. First off: the toolkit assemblies that are publically available are built against .NET 4. They can be used with the new CTP (as I did at MIX), but you'd have to download the source from Codeplex and rebuild them against those assemblies. I didn't actually use any OData v3 features in the session, so my use of the CTP was pretty superflous.

The 500 error you're getting is a generic WCF error and could be from anything, and it's vague nature isn't because of the toolkit, that's a behavior of WCF. If you add the following attribute to your service, you should see a better error message:

[ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults=true)]

Feel free to ping me if you continue having issues.

/JC

There definitely will shaggygi. When James asked me to do an episode for the show, I intended on showing a lot more, but I ended up gabbing on forever and he cut me off at 20 minutes or so Stay tuned for future episodes on producing and consuming OData services.

In the meantime, if you want to chat about how you could get started, feel free to ping me at the e-mail I mentioned above.

@Exoteric

Yep I do have a W3C Linked Data sticker on my laptop We're all fans of RDF and what the W3C have done to move the industry towards a Web of data. As you said, the original Astoria prototype did have RDF support. The only reason it was removed, in favor of AtomPub (as the default format), was because of customer feedback. 

The idea of supporting RDF is certainly still active, we just want to make sure not to randomize people without having a really good reason for it. If RDF support would be useful for you, I'd love to know. Make sure to shoot any general OData feedback you may have our way as well (joncart at microsoft dot com), as that's always useful.

/JC

The client-side validation that MVC uses is fully extensible, and it's pretty simple to wire-up a custom implementation. Out of the box, the validation uses MS AJAX, and if you want to use jQuery validation, there is an implementation of that in the MVC futures project (here). If you have any troubles getting it to work, feel free to e-mail me (joncart at microsoft dot com).

Great question, and fortunately the answer is yes I tried to keep the video short, so I couldn't go into every scenario, but all of the validation messages can be customized, as well as localized by using resource files. In the video I just simply used the default messages for example.

@ quixltd

The lab is actually kept simple intentionally. It's purpose isn't to show how to build a complete application, but rather to show off the use of new technologies in the context of a real application. Plan My Night is actually a full blown application that we'll be releasing soon that includes a lot more functionality/behavior, lending to its completeness. When we built this lab, we took portions of the app and scaled it down for simplicity. 

The main reason the lab doesn't allow you to add new activities is because in the full version of PMN we actually don't store activity ourselves, we use Bing as the activity repository (hence PMN never adds/deletes activities). When we built this lab we didn't want to add the Bing portion since that would add unnecessary complexity. The ability to add activities has nothing to do with the three exercises in the lab, so there wasn't a need to that behavior in.

The login/register links aren't wired up in this lab because they aren't part of this lab. The full version of PMN uses LiveID to implement authentication, but we didn't include this into this lab due to the same complexity argument.

It sounds like you're looking more for a reference/sample application (which offers a complete scenario-driven application) than a hands on lab (which offers a guided look at a certain set of features/functionality). If you e-mail me, I'd be happy to send you the complete version of PMN. We'll be releasing it soon publically, but I can send it to you now if you'd like (joncart at microsoft dot come).

-JC

This experience will get much better

They make us all cry. It is a "solution" for a problem that is a "solution" for another problem Getting away from generated code is the best answer.

A good portion of what I did is indeed available in .NET 3.5 SP1 (mainly the data annotations). Basically my main focus of this episode was to highlight the new "single line of code" approach, and then scope it with the context for those that aren't familiar with Dynamic Data at all.

Good news for you: the data annotations are localizable, and you can specify the order in which columns appear without having to worry about the physical order of the properties in the entity classes. Email me (joncart at microsoft dot com) and I'll get you some samples of this.