RESTful .NET

Appendix A. WCF 3.5 SP1

This book was written based on the shipping bits of WCF 3.5. Near the end of this writing, WCF 3.5 SP1 was released. This version includes some improvements and new features that are worth mentioning here. If you are already using WCF 3.5 SP1, you can still use the information in this book—everything in the main chapters will work exactly the same under SP1. In other words, SP1 doesn’t change the way anything in the Web Programming Model works, it just adds a few very useful pieces of functionality.

Atom Publishing Protocol

The Atom Syndication Format (Atom) is an XML vocabulary for describing a feed of data, which can be used to publish or syndicate information out to end users through a browser or a feed reader. Although many people think of Atom being useful only for blogs or news content, it has also become a popular resource representation for RESTful endpoints that deal with other types of content. See Chapter 6 for more detailed information about Atom.

The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) is a specification for retrieving, creating, and updating resources. AtomPub builds on the constraints of REST by defining an additional set of specific constraints above the constraints of REST. The constraints are some very specific resource representations, as well as the specific uniform interface interaction with those resources.

In Appendix B, I’ll show you a technology called ADO.NET Data Services, which uses AtomPub to define the interaction between user agents ...