MIX10 last month had a plethora of amazing announcements for the .NET world, including Windows Phone 7 development with Silverlight and XNA, Internet Explorer 9 with support for HTML5, the Open Data Protocol (OData), new developments with Windows Azure, and more. Come check out the latest and greatest with plenty of demos!

TOPIC: OData, Where Art Thou? Nick Muhonen describes OData, its service support in WCF Data Services, and its consumption through Silverlight. And of course, demos for the faithful!

Warmup - XNA Goodness on WP7 At the beginning of the meeting (6pm) Jason Mauer will present his latest XNA game project for the Windows Phone 7.

Open Data and Interoperability by Arlo Belshee

Lots of us want to expose our data via RESTful web APIs. We also want to consume data exposed via such APIs. REST + Json works well for this. However, we'd also like to mash up multiple data sources and build higher level tools. For example, it would be nice to create Business Intelligence (BI) tools that can point to any API and start charting the data, or create JavaScript control libraries that can be bound directly to data sources.

Unfortunately, that isn't possible with just REST + Json.

The problem is that each service is custom. No two services follow exactly the same rules. Sure, everything exposes sets of resources. But how do you get from a resource to its related resources? How do you ask the server to tell you about related resources? What, exactly should the server do when it gets a PATCH verb? Each server interprets these differently, which prevents making general tools.

I'm going to talk about the OData protocol. This is an open standard that defines uniform semantics and modeling for RESTful web services. I'll show how this allows general tools to be built, and data from multiple sources to be combined together in interesting ways - without requiring custom code for each server. I'll also show how this enables people working in different languages. A single library can be written for each language which can then support all OData-compliant RESTful web services.

Most of the examples will be with open source frameworks and tools, but I'll also show ways that you can use OData to break out data that is trapped in closed-source systems and expose it to the open source ecosystem.

Agenda:

7:00 - 7:30 Business We will discuss the status of our ongoing projects including PLUG's monthly Advanced Topics meetings, PLUG's monthly hands on clinics etc.

7:30 - 8:30 Presentation and Questions

See above

9:00 - ... Beer The Lucky Lab Northwest Beer Hall 1945 NW Quimby Portland, Oregon