Is work on WCF Data Services discontinued?

6
votes

I read on the WCF Data services blog this comment:

Sorry, we do not plan to release WCF Data Services in V4. But instead we will release WebApi version for service bits. We already have prerelease webapi.odata at www.myget.org/.../aspnetwebstacknightly. You can have a try or you can have your own implementation of service with ODataLib API. Thanks

This was posted by the same person who created the post, so it seems to be from an MS Employee.

Whats more, the blog has been renamed to the OData blog and all the posts seem to be only about Web API (and related).

Has anyone heard any kind of official announcement on this?

2
.netwcf-data-services
He has asked this in the Data Services forum at msdn social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/… - Mike Cheel
@MikeCheel - Yes, however, no one will answer the question... - Vaccano
I think the only thing you can take away from that statement for sure is that MS will integrate support for v4 features of OData into the WebApi libraries first, before updating the older WCF Data Services libraries, if ever, with v4 support. That doesn't mean they wont continue to maintain the older WCF Data Service stack. - mdisibio
@adamCaviness Good find. But really, it's not abandoned ... it's open source. <sarcasm>Yay!</sarcasm> - mdisibio
Yup! I learned to not investing in new fancy schmancy MS technologies after WPF crap which is also not being developed. - nosbor

2 Answers

6
votes

Multiple asks about the similar topic has been raised during the past weeks on different platforms. In order to answer them, the OData team of Microsoft has published a standalone blog post on 3/27/2014 describing the future direction of the WCF Data Services. Please refer to the link here: Future Direction of WCF Data Services.

4
votes

The "OData Team" said clearly: "To mitigate the inconvenience this may cause, we are working on cleaning up the code and making it compatible with OData v4, and will then release that stack as open source. We do not plan to put any significant investment into adding v4-specific features to the WCF DS stack." here. If they will not be implementing OData v4, it is abandoned.

Update - According to the dedicated post uploaded on 03/27/2014 and also mentioned by Yi Ding we have this clear statement:

We would love feedback on this approach. How far should we take the WCF Data Services code before releasing it as Open Source?

This confirms that the feedback they are accepting pertains to when to release WCF Data Services as Open Source. I think the community will probably do well around this but it's been a communication debacle.