Chapter 19. Building and Consuming Services with Web API and WCF

Services have transformed the way we think of the Web and how we leverage it to build software. Prior to services, the Web was mostly a means to deliver content across platforms with low deployment costs. Of course, that was a huge deal (and remains so) for Internet websites and applications. Services, however, have harnessed the power and ubiquity of the web to change the way software is written. For example, it is common for developers to write rich, native clients on tablets, phones, and gaming consoles that leverage the Web via services. Services enable software that is highly distributed, interactive, and always available while making use of a device’s power to render a great user experience.

At their core, services represent an interface (or set of methods) that provides black-box-like access to shared functionality using common formats and protocols. By this definition, a service should be loosely coupled with its clients and work across boundaries. These boundaries have, for a long time, prevented the true promise of reusable application components such as services. By working across boundaries such as process, machine, language, and operating system, services can truly be leveraged by the many potential clients that an organization might have today and tomorrow.

Visual Studio 2015 enables developers to create services that enable cross-platform applications and integration. In this chapter, we cover the two primary service technologies built into Visual Studio: the ASP.NET Web API (application programming interface) for creating Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) services and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) technology for building services that work over the Web, a network, or a related endpoint.