Introducing WCF WebHttp Services in .NET 4

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Over the next six weeks we are going to be releasing a series of blog posts that will focus on the new features in .NET 4 around WCF WebHttp Services. 

WCF WebHttp Services is the flavor of WCF that is most appropriate for developers who need complete control over the URI, format, and protocol when building non-SOAP HTTP services—services that may or may not subscribe to RESTful architectural constraints.  For the other technologies in the WCF services eco-system and the developer scenarios they best support, see here. 

For those of you who have used WCF 3.5 or the WCF REST Starter Kit to build non-SOAP services, you’ll find that WCF WebHttp Services is the vehicle that brings these technologies forward to .NET 4.  You’ll find the familiar programming model that uses [WebGet] and [WebInvoke] attributes to map an HTTP request to a WCF operation.  But you’ll also find a number of new features in WCF WebHttp Services that make it even easier to build operation-centric or RESTful web services over HTTP.

For those of you who are new to WCF or who have only used WCF for building SOAP-based services in the past, you’ll find that this series of blog posts will bring you up to speed quickly on everything you need to know to start building non-SOAP HTTP services in which you have complete control over the URI, format and protocol.      

To give you a sense of the features we will be covering in this series on WCF WebHttp Services in .NET 4, here is an index of the upcoming blog posts (we’ll update these links as the posts go public):

  1. Getting Started with WCF WebHttp Services in .NET 4
  2. Clients and the Automatic Help Page in WCF WebHttp Services
  3. Updating State in WCF WebHttp Services
  4. Automatic and Explicit Format Selection in WCF WebHttp Services
  5. Error Handling in WCF WebHttp Services with WebFaultException
  6. Using Routes to Compose WCF WebHttp Services
  7. Integrating ASP.NET Output Caching with WCF WebHttp Services
  8. Returning Custom Formats from WCF WebHttp Services
  9. Creating Views in WCF WebHttp Services with T4
  10. Conditional GET and ETag Support in WCF WebHttp Services
  11. Optimistic Concurrency Support in WCF WebHttp Services
  12. Guidance on Link Generation in WCF WebHttp Services  

We’re really excited about the new features introduced with WCF WebHttp Services in .NET 4 and we look forward to hearing your feedback in the comments to the blog posts.  Hope you find the upcoming blog post series both interesting and informative.

Randall Tombaugh
Developer, WCF WebHttp Services