RESTful WCF Web services, easily

• June 15, 2010
• James Skemp
• technology

I know I should know them better so I've been looking into WCF Web services, with a heavy lean towards an implementation based on REST principles.

After a good deal of research, where it was highly suggested that while ASP.NET MVC may make sense, WCF is still the way to go for Web services, I stumbled upon WCF WebHttp Services, which uses functionality released in .NET 4.

After a painless install via Visual Studio 2010's Extension Manager (more information), and troubleshooting a stupid mistake on my end, I was able to quickly create a Web service that uses an assembly I had created to parse one of my iTunes Playlists to Xml files and return a listing of tracks for a particular artist.

I am more than a little disappointed that it took months for me to find this, but the flexibility it allows, and the joy of working with it, makes up for it almost entirely.

Updates

10:04 P.M.: See also WCF Web HTTP Programming Model.

• asp.net
• wcf
• rest