Professional C# 2012 and .NET 4.5

Chapter 44

WCF Data Services

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Overview of WCF Data Services
• WCF Data Services hosting with CLR objects
• HTTP client access to WCF Data Services
• URL queries to WCF Data Services
• WCF Data Services with the ADO.NET Entity Framework
• Using the WCF Data Services Client Library
• Tracking, updates, and batching

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at http://www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118314425 on the Download Code tab. The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• Data Services Samples
  • Data Services Host
  • Web Request Client
• EDM Data Services Samples
  • Restaurant Data Services Web
  • Client App

OVERVIEW

WCF Data Services is based on WCF, which was covered in Chapter 43, “Windows Communication Foundation,” and it also makes a lot of use of the ADO.NET Entity Framework, that was covered in Chapter 33, “ADO.NET Entity Framework.” In that chapter, the ADO.NET Entity Framework was used to easily create an object model to map to the database structures. The Entity Framework does not provide a way to get the objects across different tiers; however, this is where WCF Data Services come into play. WCF Data Services offers a WCF service to easily access data provided by an Entity Data Model or by simple CLR objects implementing the IQueryable<T> interface.

The main namespace used with this chapter is System.Data.Services. A new technology that partly offers the same functionality as WCF ...