RESTful interfaces to SharePoint 2010

I finally saw an excellent demonstration in earlier sessions about what REST is and why it's so good.

Why Rest?

  • Natural for SharePoint Data
  • Item == Resource
  • Uniform Interface and addressing scheme
  • Low barrier of entry, interoperability

Why ADO.NET Data Services

  • RESTful conventions & frameworks for data
  • Builds on top of standard AtomPub
  • Exactly the sort of convention that is needed
  • Consistent tools and client libraries

Uses just HTTP for connections

Uniform URL convention, very flexible URL syntax

Multiple representations – use regular content-type negoation or JSON and Atom for full AtomPub support.

Allows you to retrieve data with filtering, sorting, pagination, and it's filtering it on the server to reduce traffic.

Once again he's starting in on examples in code, I like these kinds of presentations.

ADO.NET services is nice to be able to generate the proxies to access data.

Very important, you must access the data asynchronously.

Demonstrating using REST with Silverlight for UI.

We can use VS 2008 with ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP2 and allows us to start using it with MOSS.