Beginning Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Windows® Phone Applications Using Silverlight® and XNA®

SUMMARY

This chapter took you on a whistle-stop tour through the basics of web services. You started by looking at how you can access content on the Internet, using low-level HTTP access classes. In theory, you could stop there and implement web services using nothing else. However, you saw from the code in this chapter that it would take a lot of work to implement even the simplest of web services.

Next, you looked at a simple web service standard, REST. REST simplifies the calls you need to make, or at least imposes some structure on them, but it can still be slightly tricky to use as you still have to use fairly low-level HTTP calls to make it work.

In the last part of this chapter, you looked at WCF services and worked through an example. You created a simple web service and connected it to a simple Windows Phone 7 Silverlight application. You saw just how simple it can be to get a system like this up-and-running and also how simple it can be to expose your services through REST.

Obviously, there's much more that can be said about web services, especially WCF, which is capable of so much more. You'll see some more techniques in action in the next chapter, which looks at how you can make web services push notifications to a Windows Phone 7 client. You'll also find a wealth of information about WCF on the web and in many books. You'll quickly find that there is plenty to learn, and some of it is quite advanced, but the rewards are very much worthwhile.

EXERCISES

1. Which of the ...