Use ASP.NET Web API to Build HTTP Services
by Mike Snell, Lars Powers
Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Unleashed, Third Edition
- About This eBook
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents at a Glance
- Table of Contents
- About the Authors
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- We Want to Hear from You!
- Reader Services
- Introduction
- Part I: Introducing Visual Studio 2015
- Chapter 1. A Quick Tour of Visual Studio 2015
- Chapter 2. The Visual Studio IDE
- Chapter 3. The .NET Languages
- What’s New in C# 6.0 and VB 14
- Language Primer
- Language Features
- Infer a Variable’s Data Type Based on Assignment
- Create an Object and Initialize Its Values (Object Initializers)
- Define a Collection and Initialize Its Values
- Creating an Instance of a Nonexistent Class
- Add Methods to Existing Classes (Extension Methods)
- Add Business Logic to Generated Code (Partial Methods)
- Access and Query Data Using the .NET Languages
- Write Simple Unnamed Functions Within Your Code (Lambda Expressions)
- Splitting an Assembly Across Multiple Files
- Working with XML Directly Within Your Code (VB Only)
- Removing Unused Arguments from Event Handlers (VB Only)
- Creating an Automatically Implemented Property
- Dropping the Underscore in VB for Line Continuation
- Working with Dynamic Languages/Objects
- Covariance and Contravariance
- Asynchronous Programming
- The .NET Framework
- Summary
- Part II: An In-Depth Look at the IDE
- Chapter 4. Solutions and Projects
- Chapter 5. Browsers and Explorers
- Chapter 6. Introducing the Editors and Designers
- Part III: Working with the Visual Studio Tools
- Chapter 7. Working with Visual Studio’s Productivity Aids
- Chapter 8. Testing Code
- Chapter 9. Refactoring Code
- Chapter 10. Debugging Code
- Chapter 11. Deploying Code
- Chapter 12. Developing Applications in the Cloud with Windows Azure
- Chapter 13. Working with Databases
- Part IV: Extending Visual Studio
- Part V: Building Web Applications
- Chapter 17. Building Modern Websites with ASP.NET 5
- Chapter 18. Using JavaScript and Client-Side Frameworks
- Chapter 19. Building and Consuming Services with Web API and WCF
- Part VI: Building Windows Client Apps
- Chapter 20. Building Windows Forms Applications
- Chapter 21. Building WPF Applications
- Chapter 22. Developing Office Business Applications
- Part VII: Creating Mobile Apps
- Chapter 23. Developing Windows Store Applications
- Chapter 24. Creating Windows Phone Applications
- Chapter 25. Writing Cross-Platform Mobile Applications with Apache Cordova
- Index
- Code Snippets
Use ASP.NET Web API to Build HTTP Services
Nearly all compute devices created these days speak HTTP. This includes computers, game consoles, and mobile devices running on all platforms, including Windows, iOS, Android, and more. These devices use HTTP because users want access to the Internet. In addition, HTTP is open on firewalls across nearly all networks. For this reason, HTTP web services based on REST have emerged as a default standard that is highly accessible on nearly all client devices and increases interoperability across platforms.
The Microsoft ASP.NET Web API eases the development of HTTP services. You can use the skills you learned in Chapter 17, “Building Modern Websites with ASP.NET 5,” regarding web development with MVC (Model-View-Controller) to build service-oriented websites that work with nearly all clients.
The Web API framework takes care of all the plumbing code for you. For example, it includes features such as content negotiation, which allows a client and service to negotiate the right message format, including XML and JSON. Furthermore, ASP.NET Web API services are fully asynchronous and task based. They also have a lightweight hosting model, which gives you a lot of hosting options, including the cloud.
Note
We cover the new ASP.NET 5 Web API in this chapter. You can still use the older version of the ASP.NET application stack to create Web API applications in Visual Studio 2015. In fact, the prior versions work in a similar way, following the MVC pattern. They simply have a different project model and target different framework features (such as not supporting the new .NET Core CLR runtime). Please refer to Chapter 17 for a detailed discussion about the ASP.NET 5 application stack and prior versions.
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