Introduction

Though by default a WCF service will use SOAP XML and WSDL for service transferring and description, it is no longer the only means. There is another service style called, REST (Representational State Transfer), which is becoming more and more popular in the distributed service development area. In REST service programming, every service can expose its service operations or other public resources through a URI. And in most cases, the URI is just a standard HTTP URL string so that the REST service client can consume it through standard HTTP GET/POST requests. This really makes it very simple and convenient to consume a REST service.

To align the popularity of the RESTful service trend, WCF starts providing REST service programming support from version 3.5, which gets further enhanced in version 4.0.

In this chapter, we will go through the REST-oriented features in WCF programming, especially focusing on how we can leverage the WCF REST programming model to build REST-style services...