Creating RESTful Web Services with Windows Communication Foundation

 

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft’s services-oriented framework for building connected systems using the Microsoft .NET Framework. Although WCF is flexible enough to build arbitrary services-based solutions, its primary story is Web Services. To get the most out of this article, you should have at least a basic understanding of core WCF concepts including messaging, serialization, contracts, and bindings/endpoint configuration. This article was written based on .NET 3.5, the Beta 2 release.

Prior to (and including) version 3.5 of the .NET Framework, web services—whether ASMX or WCF—have been implemented using SOAP and the WS-* stack. The WS-* stack is a suite of extensions to the SOAP specification that define advanced systems-level functionality such as transactions, reliable messaging, and more. A web service was typically accessed by performing an HTTP POST to the service endpoint (for example, “http://www.example.com/ExampleService.svc”) and sending a SOAP message as the submitted data. Because HTTP is a request-reply protocol, the response to the HTTP request contained a SOAP message describing the relevant response from the server. This approach to web services is by far the most prevalent in use today, and has many compelling features that make it a viable solution to many business problems. However, this approach hijacks features of the HTTP protocol, making it a “carrier” for a completely separate protocol (SOAP). For several years, a discussion has been growing over the idea that the HTTP protocol itself is rich enough to offer the capabilities that many web services require, while simultaneously providing the benefits such as scalability that the World Wide Web has enjoyed for years—benefits that a SOAP-based web service implementation does not enjoy “for free.”

In .NET 3.5, WCF offers support for both worlds of programming: creating services that can be exposed via a SOAP endpoint, or a “RESTful” endpoint, depending on configuration. An alternate phrase for “REST” is “web programming.” REST stands for Representational State Transfer, a term coined by one of the original authors of the HTTP protocol, Roy Fielding, in his 2000 doctoral dissertation.

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