Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft® Platform

Introducing Windows Communications Foundation

At the core of the service-based AJAX application architecture is the data services layer. This layer exposes the back-end system through Web services and XML endpoints. To build data services for AJAX with ASP.NET 2.0, I would use a combination of SOAP-based ASMX Web services and HTTP handlers for simple XML data streams. With the 3.5 release of the .NET Framework, you can use Windows Communication Foundation, or WCF, to provide data services that are built from the ground up with service orientation in mind. Service orientation describes the architectural commitment to provide message-based applications that are loosely coupled, well defined, and abstracted from implementation details. A service-based ...