The .NET Endpoint : REST

The WCF services ecosystem

.NET Connected Framework Team — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:15:00 GMT

At PDC, Microsoft announced the rebranding of ADO.NET Data Services as WCF Data Services and of .NET RIA Services as WCF RIA Services. This is not just a product marketing decision – it is also a technical commitment to provide a coherent and unified services story on .NET.

The current implementations of ADO.NET Data Services (previously known as Codename ‘Astoria’) and .NET RIA Services (previously known as Codename ‘Alexandria’) are based on WCF. In fact, they are WCF services. Moving forward, future releases will align the technologies to allow features of the technologies to be used in a mix and match manner as appropriate. We are currently in early stages of investigation around potential areas of deeper integration such enabling WCF RIA services to support an appropriate subset of ADO.NET Data Service’s Open Data protocol (OData); enabling validation features that are currently only available in WCF RIA Services in other flavors of WCF services as well etc.

By unifying these services offerings on top of WCF, we are maximizing developer knowledge transfer and skill reuse in the short term and the long term. For the WCF RIA Services developer, the developer does not need to know all aspects of WCF to get their service up and running. However, if they want to add a WCF behavior or take advantage of the rich extensibility of WCF to their WCF RIA Service, they can choose to do so in a fashion that takes advantage of the unified communications programming model that is WCF.

Thus, as a result of this alignment, .NET will offer several different flavors of WCF services (listed below) that you can choose from based on your particular needs. The important thing to remember is these options will all build on the underlying WCF architecture. As such these are not binary choices – providing the .NET service developer with a choice among three different entry points into a single distributed programming framework, rather than a choice among three different programming options. We expect many applications will leverage multiple models for building out their applications and their developer's knowledge will easily transfer from one model to the other.

· WCF Core Services – Allows full flexibility for building operation-centric services. This includes industry standard interop, as well as channel and host plug-ability. Use this for operation-based services which need to do things such as interop with Java, be consumed by multiple clients, flow transactions, use message based security, perform advanced messaging patterns like duplex, use transports or channels in addition to HTTP, or host in processes outside of IIS.

· WCF WebHttp/AJAX Services – Is best when you are exposing operation-centric HTTP services to be deployed at web scale or are building a RESTful service and want full control over the URI/format/protocol.

· WCF Data Services – Including a rich implementation of OData for .NET, Data Services are best when you are exposing your data model and associated logic through a RESTful interface

· WCF Workflow Services – Is best for long running, durable operations or where the specification and enforcement of operation sequencing is important

· WCF RIA Services – is best for building an end-to-end Silverlight application

If you want to learn more about the different WCF services at PDC please check out the following sessions:

FT13 What’s New for Windows Communication Foundation
FT55 Developing REST Applications with the .NET Framework
CL06 Networking and Web Services in Silverlight
CL07 Mastering Microsoft .NET RIA Services
CL21 Building Amazing Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft .NET RIA Services
FT10 Evolving ADO.NET Entity Framework in .NET 4 and Beyond
FT12 ADO.NET Data Services: What’s new with the RESTful data services framework

Thanks, and looking forward to your feedback!

PDC 2009: Developing REST Applications with the .NET Framework

.NET Connected Framework Team — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:38:00 GMT

Attending Microsoft PDC 2009? Then come hear Henrik Frystyk Nielsen's presentation on Developing REST Applications with the .NET Framework. The talk gives an overview of REST principles and why REST is becoming popular beyond traditional Web applications. Learn how to write applications that produce and consume RESTful services using the .NET Framework 4 and the improvements we have planned for future versions of the .NET Framework.

Litware Training sample Mashup app

KentBrown — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:20:09 GMT

We've all heard of a "mashup" because its one of those buzz words, like "Web 2.0", that is picked up and repeated over and over again by the journalists and analysts. But have you actually seen one up close in the wild? Or do you have suspicions that its an elusive beast or a myth like Big Foot or Nessie? Well, we've got one of these critters in captivity for you to take home as a pet. Play with it. Get comfortable. See what makes it tick. See what tools from Microsoft are useful in building a mashup. And see if this programming style applies to something you want to do with your next application.

Litware Training is a sample "mashup" app built using ASP.NET and the WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2. It demonstrates how to build a Web 2.0 application, tapping into popular search, geographic information, and social networking APIs on the internet. It shows how to consume and expose RESTful services.

Thanks to Ben Dewey of twentysix New York who built the sample.

The Road to 4 – WCF Changes between Beta 1 and CTP

Cliff Simpkins — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:42:00 GMT

As I mentioned in my post last week covering the changes in WF 4 since the CTP release, I promised that I would cover the WCF changes this week. As I sit down to write this post, this will have a different feel from the prior post – where the last post dealt with telling the story of why changes were made, I apologize in advance if this one reads more like a release notes document. That being said, let’s dive in to the changes…

In the upcoming Beta 1 release of .NET 4, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is receiving a series of enhancements aimed at expanding its usefulness and capabilities for connecting applications together using the .NET Framework. In this post, I would like to attempt to give you a quick tour of these improvements, to help guide you through items of interest as you think about evaluating the upcoming beta of Visual Studio 2010.

Workflow Services

I’m going to start with Workflow because it is a topic that is close to my heart, and WCF Workflow Services is a primary focus for WCF 4 improvements: to provide hosting and messaging capabilities to workflow-enabled services. In Beta 1, the team has worked with the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) team to provide new messaging activities, made adding service references easier, and added a new workflow service host to make hosting a WCF workflow service even easier in .NET 4.

New messaging activities: With Beta 1, several messaging activities are being added to WF 4 that makes use of WCF underneath to receive and send messages. Messaging activities features include:
- A Serialization programming model for messaging activities has been added to support both typed and untyped content for WCF code services
- Contract settings have been moved to individual messaging activities to simplify the service modeling of complex messaging activities. In these cases, the WSDL is inferred from the contract settings on the individual messaging activities.
- Transactions support for messaging activities that allow you to now flow transactions into workflows.
- Correlation in WF now supports long-running conversations using protocol-based and content-based correlation. This allows you to route messages to workflow instances based on either content or protocol parameters, allowing for correlation of messages from multiple clients.
- Durable Duplex: Beta 1 provides first-class support for long-running, two-way conversations between workflow services using the enhancements in correlation.
Add Service Reference in WF: Add Service Reference has been augmented to support generating typed client-side activities based on the WSDL, which makes it easier to create workflows that consume other services.
Declarative Service Authoring: To enable XAML authoring of workflows that send and receive messages, we support representing WCF constructs in XAML. In particular one can author a WCF workflow Service in XAML.
Workflow Service Host (a subclass of WCF ServiceHostBase) provides WF programs with support for
- Adds the WCF plumbing for messaging activities
- Integrated configuration
- Activation of workflows authored in XAML as well code. For workflow programs and workflow services authored in XAML, we introduced a .xamlx extension together with a corresponding registered IIS handler
- Instance management via a system provided control endpoint, so you can start, pause and resume
- Durable delay to allow you to put your workflows to sleep and resume later

For those who read my post last week covering the WF 4 changes, these changes plug into the changes to the out of the box activities, and this continues a story that demonstrates the complementary story of using services and processes together. The integration of WCF and WF started with .NET 3.5, as the teams started implementing extensions within each technology to take advantage of the two technologies together, and this story will get even better as the Windows application server technology extensions (codenamed ‘Dublin’) are released, which makes it even easier to host workflow services within Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) and IIS 7. As has been covered in PDC in October and will be discussed at TechEd next week, ‘Dublin’ provides a pre-built host environment that includes a database for workflow persistence and monitoring, along with management tooling built upon IIS Manager and PowerShell to allow you to manage and control WCF and WF instances.

Config Simplification

WCF Configuration simplification also receives a good number of enhancements in .NET 4 to address a common concern around getting started with WCF. This was most acutely felt by developers coming over from the ASP.NET world, where they are used to working with ASMX services.

To help reduce the complexities that .NET developers currently experience while getting simple services set up, the team has made the following investments in Beta 1:

<service> tags not required: An explicit <service> tag is no longer required to configure a service. As a result, many deployments won’t need a “per service” configuration; instead, the service will infer a default configuration, allowing you to deploy a .svc file onto your IIS instance without the need of creating or configuring a web.config file in order for the service to be callable. This behavior should be quite analogous to the creation and deployment of ASMX files in ASP.NET.
Default bindings and behaviors: In Beta 1, you can add behaviors to a config file without using a behavior name. Within the context of that config file, those behaviors become the default behavior, and they will be used for endpoints that don’t specify a behavior.
Standard endpoints: With Beta 1, the team is providing reusable system-provided endpoint configurations to facilitate scenarios where similarly configured endpoints are used across many services.
Support for .svc-less activation: When applications have many services to them, it results in an application that has a single folder with a large number of .svc files, where each .svc file is a one-line file to represent each service. The result is often a challenge in file management. As an alternative to having these .svc one-line files, WCF 4 enables you to list all of your services in a single web.config.

If we think about at deploying one or more WCF services into an activated environment (i.e., Internet Information Server (IIS) or Windows Process Activation Service (WAS)), this allows for the ability to deploy services into an environment without having to do explicit configuration. By default, WCF in .NET 4 will make assumptions for a web environment; but WCF 4 allows for these defaults to be specified at standard configuration levels available to the .NET programmer using the standard configuration options (i.e., app.config, web.config, machine.config, etc). This should make it easier for WCF services to be managed and moved between environments as the service progresses from development to production.

Messaging Improvements

WCF Beta 1 also introduces a series of messaging improvements that improve the discoverability, performance, and scalability of systems that build upon WCF.

Service Discovery: Beta 1 adds service discovery using WS-Discovery
- Ad-hoc discovery: Services are able to publish their own services on a local subnet using a UDP multi-cast channel that is specific to the discovery feature
- Proxy-managed discovery: WCF also allows for the use of a WS-Discovery proxy to use discovery over a larger network or to reduce UDP multi-cast traffic
- Interoperable with Windows Vista’s WS-Discovery support
Router Service: With Beta 1, WCF now includes a configurable WCF-based router service that supports content-based routing and protocol bridging.
- The new content based routing capability allows for WCF to perform message filtering based on content contained in either the SOAP headers or within the message body (using a specified XPATH). Protocol bridging in WCF 4 enables the creation of bridge system bindings; for example, you may have a WCF service that uses WS-* SOAP endpoint to communicate with business partners outside the firewall and with non-.NET systems, but to use NetNamedPipes or TCP inside the firewall to communication with your other .NET services.
- Error handling routing is implemented to allow increased flexibility. With Beta 1, WCF 4 allows for the definition of alternative send destinations. If the routing service encounters a CommunicationException or Timeout while routing your message, it will automatically resend the message to the next destination endpoint your configured.
Support Queues with competing consumers: In .NET 3.5, it is difficult to implement long-running processes that worked with queues without having to make extensive use of the “poison queue” – particularly when a developer wanted to have multiple processes/machines working a single queue.
As an example, imagine a system that uses queues with WCF Workflow Services. In this example, WCF needs to be able to peek into the queue and lock the message so that it can try to dispatch it to a corresponding WF instance for work. If it is not yet possible to process the message (due to the WF instance already being locked), WCF needs to put the message back into the queue – which is problematic in .NET 3.5. In .NET 4 Beta 1, WCF 4 adds support for a “peek / lock” mechanism to the WCF MSMQ channel that now allows WCF to solve this issue.
BLOB encoder: Beta 1 provides an encoder that is optimized for sending opaque binary content as a message. In this implementation, it’s simply a write-through wrapping encoder that takes what you give it and pushes it across the wire. While it may not be as full-featured as many might want, this was something that we needed for our internal needs, and we’re exposing it for others to use if they find it useful.

In addition to the above, the team made Serialization improvements in Beta 1 that adds extensibility around dynamic “known types” resolution to improve serialization in WCF on the wire. In .NET 3.5, the DataContractSerializer class requires developers to explicitly specify a white list of “known types” that can occur in the object graph. With .NET 4 Beta 1, the team adds a new DataContractResolver class that allows the .NET developer to override this “white list” constraint by overriding what type name gets serialized and what type gets deserialized. While a lower-level and more complicated feature, it’s functionality that has been long-promised for those wanting increased control over how data is serialized and deserialized. Examples of scenarios that can be accomplished using the new feature: removing the “known types” constraint for tightly coupled scenarios; making entire assembly “known” to serializer; etc

REST Improvements

We also continue to augment WCF REST support with features that have already been made available as part of the WCF REST Starter Kit preview releases. For the Beta 1 release, the team has added a couple of the Starter Kit features into WCF 4: (a) the capability for WCF REST services to make use of the ASP.NET caching infrastructure; and (b) automatically generated help pages that allow WCF REST services describe themselves through an automatically generated help web page – detailing which URLs to call, schemas, and examples of the request and response messages (both XML and JSON).

Tracing and Diagnostics

Last but not least, tracing and diagnostics in WCF 4 reduces the noise and the performance overhead of tracing WCF events by making use of Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) and to improving the performance of using performance counters. With Beta 1, the team has refactored diagnostic events and WCF is now sending a few high-value events via ETW. This change also surfaced in my posting on new features in WF 4 Beta 1; and, as with WF, there will be SDK samples to help folks understand better this and take advantage of this high-performance tracing option. These improvements should yield significant improvements to folks debugging a live system in production.

Features in the Beta 1 that Won’t Make RTM

Lastly, as with any beta release, it represents an evolving codebase as it moves toward a releasable product, and the features and functionality can [and typically do] shift. Within the Beta 1, there are two features that are unlikely to appear in .NET 4 that I’d like to quickly touch upon:

Local Channel: We won’t be able to deliver the high-performant in-AppDomain channel in time for .NET 4. The beginning of a local (also known as 'in-proc') channel shows up in the Beta 1, but it’s in its early stages and unfinished; given resources and timing, the local channel capability will be removed in .NET 4 and won’t be present in the RTM bits.
Durable Service Host Extensions: WorkflowServiceHost provides an extensibility mechanism called DurableServiceHostExtension that allows host application developers to receive notifications for state changes of the service instance and perform control operations specific to the service instance. This general extensibility mechanism will likely go away in .NET 4 RTM in exchange for a more scoped, but robust, functionality.

And it’s off to TechEd!

I’m off to TechEd for the next week, and I’ll try to give some word from the ground, but I’m likely to disappear again for a couple weeks. When we get back from TechEd, I’m going to try and work my way back another step – discussing what WCF 4 and WF 4 mean for the .NET 3.5 developer, and how those developers should approach the technologies.

I hope that this (and the prior) post is useful and informative. At least a few customers that I’ve spoken with over the past year have expressed a desire to get information out in this fashion. If you’re at the event next week, I’m a huge fan of feedback.

Rundown on WCF, WF, and ‘Dublin’ sessions @ TechEd next week

Cliff Simpkins — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:27:05 GMT

As I spend much of this week finalizing items for TechEd next week, I thought it might be helpful to post a schedule of the great content that will be presented at the event.

If you haven’t already pre-registered for sessions, now is an excellent time to look through the schedule builder and check out all the great content and speakers we have lined up at the event.

As is tradition, the bulk of the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) sessions are in the SOA and Business Process track. This year, we are joined in the SOA track by sessions covering the ‘Dublin’ technology extensions for Windows Server, which allow you to easily host and manage your .NET 4 WCF and WF applications.

Breakout Sessions

This year, we’ve assembled some of the greatest speakers on the topics, so please join us for the following breakout sessions:

Session	Title	Speaker	Timeslot	Room
SOA201	A First Look at WCF and WF in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4	Aaron Skonnard	Tues, May-12; 8:30am	Petree Hall D
SOA202	A Lap around Microsoft Code Name "Dublin"	Dan Eshner	Tues, May-12; 2:45pm	Room 404
SOA206	Every Class As a Service: WCF As the New Microsoft .NET	Juval Lowy	Thus, May-14; 2:45pm	Room 151
SOA302	Building RESTful Services Using WCF	Jon Flanders	Thurs, May-14; 10:15am	Room 404
SOA303	Busy Microsoft .NET Developer's Guide to WCF, SOA, and Success	Jon Flanders	Fri, May-15; 1:00pm	Room 151
SOA309	Load Balancing and Scaling Your WCF Services Today and Tomorrow	Michèle Leroux Bustamante	Weds, May-13; 4:30pm	Room 515B
SOA310	Managing, Tracking, and Troubleshooting Services in "Dublin"	Ford McKinstry	Tues, May-12; 4:30pm	Room 403A
SOA401	Developing Service Oriented Workflows	Brian Noyes	Weds, May-13; 8:30am	Room 502B

For those unable to attend TechEd in person, my understanding is that all of the breakout sessions above will be recorded and be made available online. As we get more information post-event, we will post additional information up here on the blog.

In addition to the breakout sessions above, there is content that will be presented at TechEd that will unfortunately not be made available online after the event, this comes in three forms: the pre-conference sessions and interactive theatre sessions.

Pre-Conference Session

As I mentioned in my blog post on Friday, Zoiner Tejada and Michele Leroux Bustamante will be presenting a pre-conference on Sunday, the day before TechEd (PRC07: A Day of WCF + WF + "Dublin") that covers WCF and WF for .NET 4. The day is full of presentations and demos, and Michele and Zoiner have worked hard to update the session to cover the beta 1 features we’re talking about here. There are still seats available for the pre-conference, and it looks to be a real treat for those who can make it.

Interactive Theatre Sessions

Additionally, there are interactive theatre sessions that happen on the event floor among the booths. Within the Application Platform section of the floor (you can find us by looking for lots of blue), we have two theatres. Within the interactive theatres, we will have the following three sessions over the course of the week in Blue Theatre 2 that many folks are sure to find interesting:

Session	Title	Speaker	Timeslot
SOA02-INT	Communicating with State Machine Workflows	Philip Wolfe	Tues, May-12 1:00pm
SOA03-INT	Interacting with Web Services Using Microsoft Silverlight	Yavor Georgiev	Tues, May-12 4:30pm
SOA05-INT	Migrating a WF 3.0 Application to the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 and Microsoft Code Name "Dublin"	Tom Castiglia Zoiner Tejada	Weds, May-13 10:15am

Hands On Labs

We also have six hands on labs at TechEd this year, the two introducing labs have been updated based on past event feedback, and we’ve added four of brand new labs! If you have an 45-60 minutes and like to get your hands dirty with some code while you learn, please check them out:

HOL Code	HOL Title
SOA09-HOL	WCF REST: Addressability of Resources
SOA10-HOL	WCF REST: Exposing a Resource Collection with the WCF REST Starter Kit
SOA12-HOL	WCF 3.5: Introducing Windows Communication Foundation 3.5
SOA13-HOL	WCF 3.5: Unit Testing Windows Communication Foundation 3.5
SOA14-HOL	WCF and WF 3.5: Using Advanced Context Management in WCF Workflow Services 3.5
SOA15-HOL	WF 3.5: Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5

Booth

Then of course there is always the booth. The booth is open every day of the conference, and we’ll have folks there through lunch and during sessions – ready to chat with you about the technologies and show you how things work. If you have questions about WCF, WF, or ‘Dublin’, or would like to learn more about how the technologies may apply to your solution – feel free to drop by.

Over the course of the week, we have folks at the booth that can talk at a high level (BTW-that’s me ;-) ), all the way to folks that can talk through how and why the API works the way it does. And if you can’t get your question answered at that time, we should be able to help you connect with someone at the booth who can help, or getting you the answer post-conference. We have a really good crew at the booth again this year (and I’m told we have a small white board at the booth this year!)

All of that being said, we hope to see you in LA next week and to learn more about how you’re using WCF and WF today – it should be a lot of fun all around. And for those unable to attend, check out the online recordings and continue to engage with us in the forums and the Connect site!

Hosting WCF Services in Windows Azure

.NET Connected Framework Team — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:30:00 GMT

Hi folks,

Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud services operating system, based on Windows Server 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. Azure is currently in a Community Technology Preview stage and you can register and try it out for free on this page.

Many of you may have wondered what is the experience of hosting WCF services in the Azure cloud. We have created a full set of samples on our newly launched Code Gallery site:

WCF Azure Samples

The samples show hosting WCF services for use by Silverlight clients and ASP.NET AJAX clients, as well as REST WCF services built using the new WCF REST Starter Kit.

You may also find some useful workarounds on the WCF known issues page.

Cheers,
-Yavor Georgiev
Program Manager, Connected Framework Team

"Paste XML as Types" in REST Starter Kit

.NET Connected Framework Team — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:53:00 GMT

Cross-posted from the Silverlight Web Services Team Blog.

Just a quick announcement here of a release that will be interesting to Silverlight developers who want to access REST services. The WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2 is now out, go grab it at http://msdn.com/wcf/rest. The release gives you a polished install/uninstall experience, so don't be afraid to try it on your box, it won't muck it up like "preview" software so frequently does.

This release gives you one interesting client-side feature that you may have heard me or Eugene speak about: Paste XML as Types. It's a VS menu item which helps you use XmlSerializer with REST services. Frequently these services use human-readable documentation to describe the XML shape, and it is difficult to hand-code a type to use with XmlSerializer, especially when the XML instance is complex. For example check out this sample XML response from the Yahoo BOSS API. With this new feature it takes one click to generate the type:

Another interesting feature in the release is HttpClient - a sort of specialized WebClient - which can be used to programmatically access REST services using an extensible model for sending HTTP requests and processing HTTP responses. The model enables you to complete common HTTP/REST development activities required to consume an existing service in a fraction of the time you normally spend. Some convenient time-savers include query string support (build URIs as name/value pairs) and serialization support (easily plug in types generated with Paste XML as Types to read the response).

Unfortunately in this release the starter kit only contains a .Net version of HttpClient, which will not compile in Silverlight. We are considering porting this prototype to Silverilght, and if you get a chance to try it on .Net, please let us know of any feedback you have.

Cheers,
Yavor Georgiev, Program Manager
Connected Framework Team

Newly Posted - WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2

Cliff Simpkins — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:01:00 GMT

Happy Thursday everyone,

Earlier this afternoon, the WCF REST team released the second preview release of the WCF REST Starter Kit onto CodePlex. Today's release adds new client capabilities that we think should really make client-side REST development easier. Chief among the new functionality included in Preview 2 is a new class that provides a staged pipeline model for requesting resources over the web. Using this new HTTP client class allows the developer to plug into the various stages of communication to handle custom authentication, caching, and fault handling outside of the client's application logic.

For those new to the WCF REST Starter Kit - it's a collection of preview functionality that makes use of WCF to implement REST architectural patterns. The kit includes new features, Visual Studio templates, samples and guidance that enable users to create REST style services using WCF. The goal of the kit is to provide a toolset that simplifies building RESTful services today, and to get feedback from you on the features provided in the WCF REST Starter Kit - feedback that will shape future REST capabilities in WCF, in .NET 4 and beyond.

The initial release of the WCF REST Starter Kit (in October, 2008) focused on building server-side REST services, with a heavy focus on the Visual Studio project templates that help developers get a jump start developing in a RESTful manner. Since the October release, the team has received some excellent feedback and added a few additional team members, Ron Jacobs (the top evangelist around all things Workflow and WCF) has created a few hands on labs, and Aaron Skonnard has done a few screencasts for the kit.

With the release of these new bits, it's my pleasure to also announce the following:

Updated REST in WCF Dev Center on MSDN: The MSDN Dev Center for REST in WCF has been updated to account for the wider topic of REST in WCF, rather than purely focusing on the REST Starter Kit. In the coming weeks, we will be adding blog feeds to the site (similar to the parent WCF Dev Center).
Updated Hands On Labs: Ron has updated his WCF REST hands on labs, which contains labs that cover both REST development using WCF in .NET 3.5 SP1, as well as developing using the WCF REST Starter Kit. The labs provide an excellent guided tour for the newbie in all of us.
New WCF REST Sample Application: The product management crew here has been working to develop a sample application that demonstrates how to make use of the WCF REST Starter Kit on the client and server to create a training portal. The application is pretty sweet, and we look forward to sharing more information about this in the coming week.
New Screencasts: We've also been working with Aaron to get some new screencasts on the new features in the new preview of the WCF REST Starter Kit. The new screencasts should start landing onto the Endpoint show on Channel9 in the coming week.

We're hoping that you download the latest preview release and give it a try. Feel free to drop into the WCF REST Starter Kit forum over on the ASP.NET site and give us feedback. The team is on the forum daily, and is using the feedback to tweak and improve the features and functionality.

New RESTful .NET book available

KentBrown — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 04:46:52 GMT

Jon Flanders has been a thought leader in the area of doing REST in .NET. His new RESTful .NET book is now available for purchase. He goes into the motivation and background for REST and then shows how to consume and expose RESTful web services with WCF 3.5. Very few people can make low-level technical details as accessible as Jon. Definitely one to have in the library.

Announcing the WCF REST Starter Kit!

KentBrown — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:46:18 GMT

I am pleased to announce the release of the WCF REST Starter Kit today on CodePlex. The folks on the WCF team have been working hard on this for several months and it is exciting to see it released.

WCF has always had, and will continue to have, great support for SOAP and WS-*. But Representational State Transfer, or "REST" is becoming popular these days in many circles and we want WCF to have great support for both web services programming models. Because of the extensibility of the WCF architecture, it turned out to be fairly straight-forward to support REST-style services as well, making WCF the one-stop shop for building services.

We introduced support for REST in .NET Framework 3.5, and enhanced it in SP1. But there were still lots of scenarios where we saw opportunities to simplify building REST-style services in WCF and so the team set out to make major strides in this area for WCF 4.0.

The REST Starter Kit is a preview of features that are being considered for WCF 4.0, released early on CodePlex so you can download it, look at the code, play with it, and give us feedback so we deliver the right REST features in WCF 4.0

We've spun up a new area of the WCF Dev Center focused on REST capabilities in WCF and especially the WCF REST Starter Kit: www.msdn.microsoft.com/wcf/rest. You can find everything you need here to learn about building RESTful services with WCF. There are links to download the Starter Kit from CodePlex, a White Paper and series of screencasts by Aaron Skonnard from Pluralsight on using the Starter Kit, overview documentation, release notes, and even hands on labs. We also have links to great background materials on the web for learning the history and motivation of REST.

In addition to helper objects that provide new functionality (such as caching and help pages for RESTful services) there are project and item templates to make it super easy to create your first RESTful service and get it up and running quickly. In fact, you can pretty much hit F5 on the auto-generated code and have a running service. Then you can watch Aaron's screencasts to understand what the code is doing and how to modify the code to customize the service to your requirements.

There are also more advanced samples in the kit you can use to learn more about REST. And this all runs on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, so you can work with the Starter Kit with the bits we ship today.

All right, enough talk. Go download the WCF REST Starter Kit, give it a run, and let me know how you like it.

Weekly Update - New REST and 'Oslo' Screencasts

Cliff Simpkins — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:34:09 GMT

I had originally used the title 'This week in downloads'...well, because there were downloads. :) But this feels a bit like hollow advertising, and I may shop around for a new title (suggestions are always welcome), but I'll go with the very bland 'Weekly Update' title for now.

New to the web this past week:

WCF Dev Series: New Screencast on Configuring Services with Endpoints
Rob Bagby: Rob posted a couple new screencasts on using WCF to enable HI-REST style scenarios

Ron Jacobs: Ron posted a couple interviews recorded at TechEd in June

Otherwise, we are continuing to focus on building out materials that will be appearing in the month of September - new MSDN pages, new articles, and a couple virtual labs.

This Week in Downloads - WF & Services

Cliff Simpkins — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 04:01:00 GMT

Welcome to this week's installment of my weekly document and download roundup. Even though I was in Chicago for most of last week, this week sees a couple additional WF articles posted, and a few releases by Microsoft folks around Connected Systems technologies.

Michele Leroux Bustamante (MSDN Online): WF Deployment Scenarios Paper

Patterns & Practices Group: Improving Web Services Security (WCF Security Guide)
Matt Winkler (Blog): Demos from his Advanced Workflow Services TR7 talk

Matt Milner (MSDN Magazine) - Workflow Tips & Tricks
Ron Jacobs (endpoint.tv) - Bob Familiar chats with Ron, discussing REST & SOAP

Michele's WF Deployment Scenarios Paper
We've published a couple more sections of Michele's WF Deployment Scenario Guidance whitepaper. The publication of these two sections brings us up to four of the five articles now live in the MSDN WF Whitepapers & Articles section.

Upcoming this Week
We have a new weekly series starting up on Wednesday that I'm excited about. I hope to see you again in a few days, to learn about it.

This Week in Downloads - Events

Cliff Simpkins — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

This week had a few videos and a new article go up to MSDN this week:

The TechEd Online videos were recorded at the TechEd 2008 Developer Conference [North America] in June. The first two videos were interviews done by Ron in the TechEd fish bowl, and the third was done by Rob Bagby.

The deck and demo come from a talk this week done by Kirk Evans. This week, at the Microsoft TechReady conference, Kirk did a chalk-talk discussing patterns that typically come up within WF scenarios. The scenarios were well received, attendees of the chalk talk scored it well, and I thought it was a great idea for a chalk talk. And, everyone thought it was a grand idea for Kirk to post it up on his blog and share it with the world. :)

Additional Web Items of Note
The Windows SDK team posted a couple surveys, and they're looking for customer input on SDK improvements/changes - and how it interfaces with Visual Studio.

The two surveys that they're looking for input on are:

To close on a down note, we missed getting the third installment in Michele's WF Deployment Scenarios series - Workflow Services - posted up this week. It's done and edited, but Friday afternoon isn't the best time to try and move an article through the MSDN publication process. Look for it to show up on the site early next week.

endpoint.tv - Getting Control of the URI with RESTful WCF Services

ronjacobs — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:40:27 GMT

RESTFul people want to control the URI of their services. They focus on building a good information architecture that describes the resources their site provides. Historically most web sites described resources in terms of files and paths in the virtual root of the web server. But what if your resources are coming from a database and there are no files to speak of? What is the URI of your service then?

The default behavior of a RESTful web service in WCF is that you have a SVC file like "MyService.svc" and the first segment of your URI (after the host) is the path to the SVC file on your web site. The remaining portion of the URI is the name of your method and a query string arguments for the parameters.

For example

http://www.example.com/myservice.svc/GetWine?wineId=17

You can partially control this URI by applying a URI template. So for example in this case we could attribute the operation contract with a template like this

[WebGet(UriTemplate="wine/{wineId})]

This will change the portion of the URI after the .svc extension so our URI will look like this

http://www.example.com/myservice.svc/wine/17

Nice, but what if you want to eliminate the .svc extension? Well there are several ways you can get this done

Scott Guthrie has a great blog post about this - Tip/Trick: Url Rewriting with ASP.NET
Jon Flanders (MVP) blogged about writing an HttpModule - Using WCF WebHttpBinding and WebGet with nicer Urls
The IIS7 Team Recently Released a URL Rewrite Module
For IIS 5/6 you will have to build//use an ISAPI filter (See ScottGu's post for some free ones)

My colleague Rob Bagby has created a nice screencast for endpoint.tv with a complete walkthrough of controlling the URI that features

UriTemplate
New WCF 3.5 SP1 features for URI control like compound segments and default values
A URL Rewrite Rule for the IIS7 URL Rewrite Module

Be sure to check it out and build some RESTful WCF Services with the URI just the way you want it.