Question

I want to write my first REST web service using the .Net framework. I’ve seen fairly passionate comments from various people about which is best and have even found some differing comments from Microsoft.

My web service should be fairly simple: I want to expose bus timetable information. I figure the resources I will be concerned about are

• Fares
• Timetables (routes, stops)

What would be the most appropriate (i.e. not necessarily the easiest, most fun or your personal preference) technology to use out of WCF, ADO.NET Data Services or ASP.Net MVC?

Answer 1

WCF is the Microsoft messaging bus. It aims to help with development of distributed message driven services.

WCF Data Services is an implementation of the OData protocol on top of WCF that helps with exposing your data through an automatically generated RESTful interface.

ASP.NET MVC is a framework that helps with development of web applications based on the model-view-controller pattern.

You can implement your RESTful service using any of the three technologies, however:

• Choose WCF if you want full control over the definition of your service interface and payload.
• Choose WCF Data Services if you need to expose your data over OData with minimum efforts around the actual service implementation.
• Choose ASP.NET MVC if you want a simple RESTful service that is well integrated within your a web-site and shares and reuses code with it; and you don’t mind the overhead of the ASP.NET pipeline.

I would personally suggest you use the WCF Data Services to implement your service, since it seems to be mostly data-driven.