This week we released our third “alpha” CTP build of our Telerik OpenAccess Data Services Wizard on Telerik Labs. We have received tons of feedback on the tool and look forward to more feedback. The wizard’s development team and the entire OpenAccess team have come up with a roadmap and would like some feedback from the community on it. In the spirit of a transparent design, I am going to publish the entire roadmap here for community review. Of course all of this can change blah blah blah. (The lawyers made me say that.)

Beta 1: January 2010

• Using T4 Code generation instead of text templates
• VB.NET code generation (we had a ton of requests for this one!) 
• Add WCF Data Services 1.5 full integration using the new Data Service Provider (of course we need to make changes to OpenAccess core to implement the DSP, however, the DSP is currently not fully documented by Microsoft, so we don’t know how much work this is just yet.)
• Generate only the primitive types and prevent generation of complex entities for all services. (WCF barfs on complex types and entities.)

Beta 2: February 2010

• Full support for WCF RIA Services
• Full support for Azure Services
• If you use the wizard to build a service, give you the option to automatically create a Silverlight client along with some code generation to consume the service to get you started
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data support

Release: Telerik Q1 2010 Release

• Full integration with OpenAccess’ installer. No longer making the wizard a separate install, it will just install as part of OpenAccess
• Use of OpenAccess internal APIs
• Visual Studio 2010 support
• WCF 4.0 Support. We currently require the WCF 3.5 REST Starter Kit for two of our output modes: REST Collection and AtomPub. .NET 4.0 mode will eliminate this dependency and give you the option to produce WCF 4.0 REST services, etc.

After the Q1 release the roadmap is not super clear. I will assume that core development will slow down a little and that we will then focus mostly on adding support for new service types. I am sure that by next spring, there will already be some new service types to support like the release build of WCF RIA Services, maybe a new CTP of Astoria, etc.

Drop me a line and let me know what you think! Also, the tech support team is adding a separate Data Service Wizard forum in the Telerik support forums, so even though the wizard is technically a “lab” project and not supported, drop by and ping the team with your questions there. We’ll answer all your support questions there as well.

Enjoy and thanks for any feedback you send.