Your Data Everywhere, Part 5: Consuming LightSwitch's OData Services from Windows Phone 8 Apps
Recently Microsoft launched Windows Phone 8 and the developer tools for Visual Studio 2012. With this version of the IDE and the new SDK for Windows Phone, you can build apps for Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 7.5 without needing Visual Studio 2010. The Windows Phone 8 developer tools (which ship for free) offer a very important capability: consuming LightSwitch's data sources via OData services in Windows Phone 8 apps. Along with the other options covered in the previous articles in this series, this article's coverage of consuming LightSwitch's OData services from Windows Phone 8 apps completes the possibilities for sharing your business data with platforms that target all the most recent technologies from Microsoft.
Installing the Windows Phone Developer Tools
Windows Phone 8 was released recently, as well as the developer tools, called Windows Phone SDK 8.0. The kit includes a number of tools, such as an add-on for Visual Studio 2012 that makes it possible to use the new version of the IDE to build apps for Windows Phone, plus Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Phone, and other tools required to test and deploy applications to both physical devices and the device emulator.
Your development machine must have at least 4GB of RAM. Once you've installed the Windows Phone SDK 8.0, as with Windows 8 Store Apps, in order to enable the Add Service Reference dialog in Visual Studio 2012 to connect to OData services, you need to download and install a specific extension called OData Client Tools for Windows Phone Apps. This download (about 8MB) enables developers to use OData services in Windows Phone 8 apps. Before attempting to follow the instructions in this article, make sure that you've downloaded and installed both the SDK and the OData tools.