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Asked: 2026-05-30T08:50:05+00:00

The reason why I need loosely-coupled WCF because Entity Framework is tightly-coupled. When I

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The reason why I need loosely-coupled WCF because Entity Framework is tightly-coupled. When I say loosely-coupled, there’s no need to instantiate the database context or add the service reference of WCF. It just rely on web configuration or some .ini file that does not require compilation when developers need to change servers, ip address or service url’s.

Instead, the MVC(say controller) will just send request message and then gets the response data from WCF service. But still we cannot afford without having Models based on the database (since we need it in intellisense for views markup), where the WCF will get the data. Let say we have those database objects class already, create some repository that binds the WCF data to the MVC Models.

What I mean of WCF web service, it ONLY contains messages, no more passing of object reference, because thats the new SOA definition. It makes more sense to pass messages instead of objects.

Is this a better approach? In terms of scalability and performance, I don’t mean to offend the Entity Framework Fans.

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  1. Editorial Team

    It is an entirely valid approach to define a WCF web service in terms of message schemas which just use basic types, so that clients need know nothing about WCF in order to use the service. WCF would be useless for interop with other platforms (e.g. Java) otherwise.

    Understand that WCF is a general and powerful framework for implementing communication over a variety of transport protocols. It can be equally effectively used for raw XML messaging as for programming in terms of objects. Object serialisation and deserialisation is an optional extra of the framework, not a requirement. (There is really no such thing as “passing of object reference” – ultimately it is an XML infoset which travels across the communication channel. Also, Entity Framework is not part of WCF – it is a distinct ORM Framework which you can use with WCF if you want, but that’s your choice.)

    Scalability and performance is entirely orthogonal to the design of the service in terms of its data and operation contracts. You should feel free to adopt whatever approach to defining your services is best for your application. If that’s XML messages, that’s fine – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

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