Chapter 9. WCF Data Services

Availability: .NET 3.5 SP1 (Limited Functionality) Onward

WCF Data Services (previously called "Astoria" and "ADO.NET Data Services") allows data to be modified and exposed over an HTTP RESTful interface. WCF Data Services (WDS) contains a rich query language and can be accessed easily with automatically generated proxy classes or by crafting raw HTTP requests.

WCF Data Services supports returning data in a number of popular data formats such as XML, AtomPub, and JSON and is potentially very useful for integration scenarios and applications that don't maintain a direct connection to the database such as Silverlight.