OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010: Beta now available

Microsoft has released a beta version of an OData service for TFS 2010. This is great way for people wanting to get data from TFS without having to use the object model.

[Update: If you are having problems installing this, there is a know issue. More details and workaround on Brian Keller’s Post]

Besides exposing all TFS capabilities via Web Services, TFS provided from day one an object model SDK that allows you to interact and extend TFS capabilities (incidentally this is the same object model Microsoft uses to write Team Explorer, so Microsoft  can’t do on its own client  anything that you  can’t do yourself). The object model is the recommended way to interact with TFS, since not only provides a good abstraction over the web services but it also isolates you from changes made to the web services from release to release.

But this meant that in order to interact with TFS you had to use .NET (or any language capable of talking to .Net) in your applications. With the new OData service you can now get data from TFS from any other client that can talk OData.

This opens up great possibilities, like writing clients in WP7, Android,tables, Linux, Mac, Web Servers or for example showing up data in Sharepoint with no programming at all (basically any client that can speak HTTP)

For non programmers this also opens a tremendous opportunity for exploring data since you now use Power Pivot in Excel to get data from TFS and correlate them with other sources quite easily.

Here you can see a (small) list of consumers that are able to consume OData.

You can read more details about the OData Services on this Brian Keller Post which explains this more better than me.

For those to lazy to follow the click I’ve embedded the video (Silverlight) right here you can also download the video to your Zune, Ipod, WP7,etc here