I just worked through a book on WCF and was surprised that it didn’t even mention REST at all.
Was REST an afterthought for WCF that was added in .NET 3.5 SP1 and hence not baked in well or is it well integrated?
I assume that Silverlight and XBAPs can consume WCF with no problem or do they have some limitation due to their sandbox environments? I’ve been reading that some people are having problems getting WCF to play well with XBAP and I would assume there are similar problems with Silverlight.
Many of the constraints to apply to a REST system will be difficult, if not impossible, to implement with WCF REST. The programming model has leaky abstractions (different methods for json / xml), doesn’t support multiple media types (only xml and json), relies too much on uri parameters for method selection, etc. And it doesn’t integrate with asp.net in any way, aka there’s a difference between the service /customer handled by WCF and the /customer that should return html.
Not that you couldn’t implement all those yourself, but you’ll soon end up with something that replaces nearly everything that WCF Rest has out of the box.