Creating a Custom Gemini/PowerPivot Data Feed - Method 1 - ADO.NET Data Services

There are already a few good Gemini/PowerPivot blogs that provide an introduction into what it is and does so there is no need for repetition.  What I haven’t seen are examples of how existing investments can be harnessed for Gemini/PowerPivot based self-service analytics.

This series of posts focuses on various ways of creating Custom Data Feeds that can be used by Gemini/PowerPivot natively – Providing a direct feed from otherwise closed systems opens up new channels of analytics to the end user.

Gemini/PowerPivot supports reading data from Atom-based data feeds, this post looks at a quick way of creating an Atom-based feed that can be consumed by Gemini/PowerPivot.  By far the simplest way to develop an Atom-based data feed is to employ ADO.NET Data Services in conjunction with ADO.NET Entity Framework.  With very few (in fact one and a bit!) lines of code, a data source can be exposed as a feed that Gemini/PowerPivot can read natively. 

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