New version CTP of ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 is now available

ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria) has now the CTP2 release for version 1.5 available that will have the following new features:

• Projections, the possibility of getting only the columns chosen instead of retrieving all the columns. With this we have now a new set of expressions to provide this ability on the URI.
• DataBinding, Simplification of the DataBinding for Silverlight and WPF, because using the DataServiceCollection class we can bind it directly to the Data Service.
• Row Count, Ability to determine the number of elements in a set of entities without having to retrieve them all.
• Feed Customization, Possibility to customize the way the feed is created instead of using only the default AtomPub version.
• Server Driven Paging, Provides the ability to define the number of elements retrieved by a request, and also the server will provide a link to the Next and Previous results page.
• Enhanced BLOB support, enable data services to stream arbitrarily large BLOBs, store binary content separate from its metadata, easily defer the loading of BLOB content when its metadata is requested, etc.
• Request Pipeline, Possibility to handle the several events that occur during the Request because in the version we have access to a complete set of Request Level Events.
• New Interface for Custom Providers Writer, New model to develop Custom Providers for ADO.NET Data Services, like here.

You can download it here, and to know more about the subject, read this post about this by the Product Team.