Features of WCF

WCF includes the following set of features:

Service Orientation 

One consequence of using WS standards is that WCF enables you to create service oriented applications. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the reliance on Web services to send and receive data. The services have the general advantage of being loosely-coupled instead of hard-coded from one application to another. A loosely-coupled relationship implies that any client created on any platform can connect to any service as long as the essential contracts are met.

JSON – Serialization and Deserialization

What is JSON?

JSON is another format of expressing data, just like XML. But, JSON is very simpler than XML, and tiny than XML. So, it is becoming popular in the web world to choose the JSON notation over XML since JSON notation are usually shorter, and less data to be transmitted if at all they were to be.

Okay, I understood a little about JSON. Give me an example!

 I know an example will get your understanding much better. Below is a simple example of how an object can be expressed in JSON notation. Let’s take a classical example of a Person object, and expressing myself as an object.

{

   “firstName”: “Rakki”,

   “lastName”:”Muthukumar”,

   “department”:”Microsoft PSS”,

   “address”: {

      “addressline1”: “Microsoft India GTSC”,

      “addressline2”: “PSS - DSI”,

      “city”: “Bangalore”,

      “state”: “Karnataka”,

      “country”: “India”,

      “pin”: 560028

   }

   “technologies”: [“IIS”, “ASP.NET”,“JavaScript”,“AJAX”]

}

In the above example, address is another object inside my Person, and technologies is an array or strings.

 

Using JSON with ASP.NET 3.5

Introduction

Almost any application that you write will involve exchanging data from a client application to the server. This process involves selecting a data format and exchange protocol that will be required to enable this communication. When it comes to selecting these data formats, you have a variety of open standards that you can consider and the ideal choice depends on the requirements of the application.

For example, if you use SOAP based Web services, you format the data in an XML payload that is wrapped within a SOAP envelope. Although XML works well for many application scenarios, its inherent chatty nature makes it less than ideal for certain scenarios. For example, in an AJAX style Web application, you make asynchronous lightweight out-of-band calls to the server side to get the required data without even refreshing the browser. In this scenario, you need a lightweight, open, text-based platform independent data exchange format for transferring data back and forth between the client and server. That’s exactly what the JSON (Java Script Object Notation) standard provides.