Data Access has been discontinued. Please refer to this page for more information.

WCF Data Services - Overview

This article is relevant to entity models that utilize the deprecated Visual Studio integration of Telerik Data Access. The current documentation of the Data Access framework is available here.

WCF Data Services (formerly known as "ADO.NET Data Services") is a component of the .NET Framework that enables you to create services that use the Open Data Protocol (OData) to expose and consume data over the Web or intranet by using the semantics of representational state transfer (REST). OData exposes data as resources that are addressable by URIs. Data is accessed and changed by using standard HTTP verbs of GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE.

WCF Data Services uses the OData protocol for addressing and updating resources. In this way, you can access these services from any client that supports OData. OData enables you to request and write data to resources by using well-known transfer formats: JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), a text-based data exchange format used extensively in AJAX application, and Atom, a set of standards for exchanging and updating data as XML.

For more advanced Silverlight demos, you could refer to the Telerik Data Access Samples Kit. It is an easy to use resource browser that includes various demos and relevant information for the developers. The samples are grouped by technology (ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, WCF, N-Tier, etc.) and can be filtered by programming language (C# or VB) and complexity (levels 100-400). The Telerik Data Access Samples Kit is intended for browsing the code samples offline, so it should be downloaded and installed separately from the Telerik Data Access product.

Samples Kit Demos

The Telerik Data Access Samples Kit includes the Sofia Car Rental - WCF RIA Services demo, which demonstrates the best practices recommended for using Silverlight and WCF RIA services.

The topics in this section are entirely dedicated of the integration of WCF Data Services, Telerik OpenAccessORM and Silverlight 4 applications: