ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Overview of WCF Data Services

When you see data access samples, most of them illustrate making a direct database connection from the web server (even if it’s from a data tier) to the database. Although this is fine for illustrative purposes, it’s not that practical. In many production environments, firewalls and other security systems prevent direct database connections of any kind. As previously mentioned, in many service-oriented, distributed systems, client code must go through a service to read or write any data.

In the past, developers had to manually create their own service-based facades in front of the database, generally creating headaches and extra work. WCF Data Services aims to solve some of these problems. A WCF Data Service is ...