{Programming} & Life

I know all you buzz-word kids want me to use words like ‘zen’ and ‘art’ and things like that, heck all this talk of RESTful services is already set enough confusion into peoples minds.

But however I decided to take a lunge deep into WCF and investigate what can be done to make such services “RESTful”.

I am not going to turn this into a 4 page blog post explaining what REST is all about, there are many blog posts on the net that do that well enough already, but what I am going to do is post the best links I think are useful on the topic, in fact the below links are great if you wish to learn from the ground up what WCF is about as well in case you have never had a chance to play with it and want to learn more and then the links after can have you jumping straight into configuring your WCF service to adhere to a “RESTful” manner with the great new support provided in .NET 3.5.

ON THE TOP OF MY LIST

• Is a great 70min (and most importantly, recent) video from PDC 2008 explaining from the ground up what REST is all about and how to support a REST design (great for those who want a complete brain injection of information and don’t feel like reading a ton of articles. Includes great demos and two good speakers):
  http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL35/
• “A Guide to Designing and Building RESTful Web Services with WCF 3.5″ – A great article worth following which goes into similiar detail as the video, but also goes over authorisation, authentication and consuming RESTful services:
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203052.aspx

AND THE REST

And for anyone that doesn’t know what the hell is going on and want to learn more about WCF, this is a great starting point:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480190.aspx
• http://www.15seconds.com/Issue/061130.htm

And for anyone that wants extra marks and is interested in returning JSON from RESTful interfaces with WCF:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jdanforth/archive/2008/08/23/returning-json-from-restful-interface-with-wcf.aspx

And finally, a link spoken about in the PDC video, the new home page setup for the WCF REST Starter Kit:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/cc950529.aspx

Over and out.