Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Querying Data via Http Requests

WCF Data Services can be queried via http requests. This is possible because of the REST approach offered by this particular kind of WCF services and that is basically a special XML serialization format for data exchange; XML is perfect at this point because it allows standardizing how data is exchanged in both directions. Querying a Data Service is substantially performed by writing an Uri (Uniform Resource Identifier) in your web browser addresses bar or in managed code. For example, suppose you have a Data Service exposing data from the Northwind database. When deployed, the service has the following address:

http://localhost:4444/Northwind.svc

Http requests sent to a Data Service are represented by the http ...