Programming Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012

WCF Data Services

Microsoft designed WCF Data Services as a thin layer over Entity Framework that exposes data-centric services to client applications across the Internet. You can think of WCF Data Services as universal Web Services built just for data. The platform is based on open industry standards and protocols, which means that these services are consumable by virtually every type of client in the world. And you can quickly build a WCF Data Services over an EDM with almost no effort whatsoever. Before building your very first service (and a corresponding client piece), let’s first explain the industry standards that WCF Data Services is based upon—which are REST and the Open Data Protocol (OData).

REST provides a uniform interface for querying ...