A Developer’s Guide to the WCF REST Starter Kit

My latest whitepaper has been published on MSDN – it’s called A Developer’s Guide to the WCF REST Starter Kit. 

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 3.5 introduced a “Web” programming model for building RESTful services in .NET. Although WCF 3.5 lays a solid foundation for building a wide-variety of RESTful services, it still requires developers to implement a great deal of boiler-plate code for each RESTful service they build and to deal directly with important HTTP protocol features. The WCF REST Starter Kit provides a set of WCF extensions and project templates that aim to simplify REST development even further. Although the WCF REST Starter Kit is currently considered a “preview” technology, many of its features will most likely find their way into future versions of the .NET Framework, including v4.0.

In this whitepaper, I fully explore the various WCF REST Starter Kit features, including the new client-side features introduced through the HttpClient class, and how can begin putting them to good use to handle some of the most common REST development scenarios today.

If you’re unfamiliar with REST concepts or the WCF 3.5 REST programming model, be sure to read A Guide to Designing and Building RESTful Services with WCF 3.5 before digging into this one.