Learning WCF

Summary

This chapter focused on contracts and serialization to provide you with the tools you need to design service contracts and where applicable, exercise greater control over serialization. You learned about classic code-first approaches to building a service description, which means relying on service contracts, data contracts, message contracts and other serializable types to produce WSDL. You also learned some techniques that can be applied to contract-first scenarios, where the WSDL or XSD schema is provided up front and your service must conform. Namely, using IXmlSerializable you can respect preexisting XSD schema while still building a service contract to frame the operations available at an endpoint.

Things you should take away from this chapter include the following recommendations:

• Where possible, try to use code-first approaches, which will improve your productivity in designing services.

• Develop a consistent set of naming conventions that you apply across all of your services, including those for the target namespace, the schema namespace, and operation and parameter names.

• Decide whether you will use strict or non-strict approaches to versioning and follow the guidelines I have provided for achieving those results.

• Use message contracts if you need custom headers.

• Consider IXmlSerializable for situations where the XSD schema has been provided in advance, for example by standards organizations in your industry.

Now that you have learned almost all there is to know about ...