Question

I’m looking to create an Application Object Server that is sitting between Window form client and SQL 2008R2 Database, it handling application business rule and support CRUD, I have achive this with WCF and WCF dataservice in the past, It would be better if we can combine those two kind of WCFs into one.
Do you know any way to achive this? or we should go back to the WinSock day.

Awaiting for your thoughts

Answer 1

WCF Data Services are based on the REST-style WCF services (webHttpBinding) – so those are quite fundamentally different from the traditional SOAP-style WCF bindings.

I don’t see how you could easily combine WCF Data Services with a traditional SOAP WCF service (assuming that’s what you’re trying to do).

What you could do is:

• create an entity data model as basis for both services
• create the WCF Data Service on top of that EDM
• separately create a set of WCF SOAP service methods, based on the same EDM

But SOAP and REST are quite different, at a very basic level:

• REST tends to work with resources – you have a Customer (also in your URL), and you can fetch it, edit it, update it, delete it

• SOAP on the other hand tends to work more with operations – you have your customer, but then you expose methods like GetCustomer, UpdateCustomer etc. – your basic building blocks are methods that take parameters