Network Service Technologies

Windows Phone provides various ways of consuming network services, including the following:

SOAP services—SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. SOAP uses an XML format. In Windows Phone, SOAP services are usually consumed using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

REST services—REST stands for Representational State Transfer. REST relies on HTTP and uses unique URLs to identify resource entities. Create Read Update Delete (CRUD) operations are performed using HTTP GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. Various open-source projects are available for consuming REST services.

OData—OData stands for Open Data Protocol. It is a web protocol for querying and updating data. OData is the main topic of this chapter.

Plain HTTP services—Some services are provided using nonstandardized protocols, where HTTP GET requests are used to consume an API. For example, Google search can be queried using a URL, and the results can be returned in JSON.

Windows Phone apps can access these services directly, or in the case of WCF or OData, may use a proxy that is generated from the service’s published metadata.

Visual Studio generates proxy classes for SOAP and OData services by selecting the Add Service Reference from the Project menu.

A network service can be hosted on your own server, or on the cloud. It may be a service that you have written in-house, or it could also be a third-party service, where you can query the service but may not have access to its source code.