Question

I’m trying to develop a .net4 application  using c#, wcf and entity framework. My first idea was to pass the EF generated objects through wcf (first with the default entity objects, then with the POCO entities), but I soon got several connection problems (connection is closed) due to non serializable objects in the generated entities. I ended up writing several data-only classes to host the data queried with EF, but now I miss the role of the EF with WCF. I guess I’m doing something wrong, so how do you send data through wcf using EF? What is the point of EF? Wouldn’t it be easier to write stored procs and standard ado.net…?

Answer 1

Entity Framework is just a data access technology. You can create a data access layer which talks to your database and return the required data using Entity framework and then plug that to your WCF service so that your WCF service will get the data. You can use the same data access layer with any other consumers ( a Silver light application, A Windows form project or an MVC application). The advantage of using Entity framework is that it will load the data to your domain objects (your POCO classes) so that you do not need to do it manually yourself. In the case of Stored proc, you need to execute the stored proc, Iterate thru the DataReader/ DataTable the fill your objects. For this you have to write code. If you use Entity framework, EF does this for you so you can save some dev time.

You should clearly logically seperate your project so that there will be a data access and a consumer which consumes the Data Acccess layer( your WCF service).