ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Using Data Services with a Service Reference

If you’ve used Visual Studio for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the ability to add service references to existing projects. These either discover services in the current solution, or you can enter the URL of a WCF service and the service reference creates a client-side proxy for you. Up until now, this has worked only for regular web services.

With Visual Studio 2010 and WCF Data Services, you can add a Service Reference to a WCF Data Service. This Service Reference can create a special client proxy for you, one that exposes all the entities for the service and handles all the change tracking and other heavy lifting that, as a service consumer, you just don’t want to have to deal ...