ADO.NET Data Services Update Released

A new version of the ADO.NET Data Services API was released, and you can get it from here, for the Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, and from here, for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Overview
The ADO.NET Data Services framework consists of patterns and libraries that enable the creation and consumption of REST-based data services for the web. This update to the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 provides additional features which extend the functionality provided in version 1.0 of the ADO.NET Data Services framework. The ADO.NET Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 provides the following new features and improvements:

• Built-in integration in Microsoft Office 2010 now makes it simple to expose Microsoft Office SharePoint Server data as a data service and access that data using the ADO.NET Data Services client library.
• Custom Data Service Provider support now makes it easier to build an ADO.NET Data Service over any data source.
• A new DataServiceCollection class has been added that supports rich two-way data binding. The new collection implements automatic change tracking on client side objects created using the ADO.NET Data Services client library.
• Feed customization, provides a rich and flexible way to shape and modify the structure of ATOM feeds produced by an ADO.NET Data Service. Modifying the structure of the ATOM feed produced by the ADO.NET Data Services makes it possible for third-party clients that can consume an ATOM feed in a custom format to consume feeds from an ADO.NET Data Service.
• Enhanced blob support for streaming large binary objects to/from a data service. Support has also been added to the ADO.NET Data Services client library to provide the ability to upload and download binary objects (such as: images, videos, documents, etc.) from an application created using the library.
• Server-driven paging allows a service author to limit the size of the result set returned by a query; this gives the service author a new level of control over the network bandwidth and computation time required to process any request.
• A new select query option allows the result of a query to be projected into an arbitrary type; projecting gives the client the ability to request a specific set of properties of an entity. Reducing the number of properties requested in a query reduces processing time and network bandwidth for the request.
• The option to request a count of the number of entities in a set and the option to include the total count of the number of entities in the set when a query returns a partial result.
• Request pipeline improvements give the service author greater control and customization ability over various stages of query processing.

In order to use it, you must specify the new version in the InitializeService method, which requires that you switch the parameter type from IDataServiceConfiguration to DataServiceConfiguration:

public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) 
{
    config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2;
}