Question

I am familiar with Code_First Approach in developing WCF Web Service, but now my client has requested to have Schema First Approach for the same Web Service.

Can some one please share few point on the advantage of Scheme First Approach, and any specific reason for going Schema First Approach.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

“The schema-first method benefits you particularly in scenarios where you need to use existing schemas, as they may have been modeled during very early stages of your development lifecycle in order to come to an agreement with stakeholders. This is a common situation in government and banking environments. You may also need to use existing schemas if you are building applications complying with existing industry standards such as the Open Travel Alliance (OTA).

The choice between the two approaches for contract definition should
also be based on your scenario, resources and the skills available in
your team. For instance, if you are building a WCF service that
doesn’t need to support clients running on other platforms, you
probably don’t want to consider a schema-first approach. Also, if you
are quite familiar with contract programming constructs in WCF, have a
good understanding of the serialization process, and have the ability
to focus on hierarchical structures instead of object graphs, you can
follow the code first approach and achieve the same results”

Quote from – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335699.aspx