Building a self-hosted REST service

Since a REST-style WCF service provides an endpoint that is accessible through standard HTTP GET/POST requests, it is quite common and reasonable to host a REST service in an ASP.NET web application (via a .svc file). However, we can also use any .NET-managed application to host a WCF REST service out of an IIS server.

In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to use a console application to host a WCF REST service.

How to do it...

Creating a self-hosted REST service is quite similar to a standard WCF service, but with some minor differences. Let’s take a look at the detailed steps here:

1. Define the ServiceContract for the REST service.

   The first thing to do is define a ServiceContract for our sample REST service. Here we will use a very typical interface as the ServiceContract of the sample REST service (see the following code snippet):

   [ServiceContract(Namespace=”WCF.REST”)]
   public interface IDataService
   {
      [OperationContract]
      [WebGet(ResponseFormat= WebMessageFormat...