Programming Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012

WCF Data Access Options

You can certainly work with WCF directly to create custom services and expose data from an Entity Data Model (EDM) with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, or any other data access layer (DAL) of your choosing. To take this “raw” approach, you need to start with the basics, or what is commonly referred to as the ABC’s of WCF: Addresses, Bindings, and Contracts. You must create service, operation, and data contracts, and then configure your service model with appropriate endpoint addresses and compatible bindings to be reachable by clients. Services are usually stateless, so you must also handle client-side change tracking and multi-user conflict resolution entirely on your own. The learning curve can be quite steep, after which ...