Well, day 2 of the MIX10 conference did not disappoint.  The keynote speakers introduced the preview release of IE9, which looks really cool and quick, and Visual Studio 2010 RC that is scheduled to RTM on April 12th.  It seemed to have a lot of improvements aimed at making developers more productive.  Here are the current links to these two offerings:

• Internet Explorer 9 – Platform Preview
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 – Release Candidate

While both of these were interesting, the demos that really blew me away today centered around the work being done with The Open Data Protocol, or OData for short!  OData is a recommended standard being pushed by Microsoft that uses a REST based interface to interact with various types of data in a uniform manner.  Data producers then provide the data to consumer in either ATOM or JSON formats as requested by the client application.

The OData SDK contains client and server libraries for many of the popular languages in use today, including .NET, Java, PHP, Objective C and JavaScript, so you consume or even produce your own OData services.  More information can be found using the following links:

• OData.org
• How to navigate an OData compliant service
• Query Functions (WCF Data Services)

Netflix has made available one of the first live OData services by exposing their entire movie catalog.  You can browse and query using URLs similar to the following:

• http://odata.netflix.com/
• http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Genres('Horror')/CatalogTitles
• http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/CatalogTitles?$filter=startswith(Title/Regular,%20'Star%20Wars')&$orderby=Title/Regular

So now I just need to find an excuse reason to start using OData in a real project!

Enjoy!