WCF Data Services and Entity Framework

Question

just a couple of questions?

• Is WCF Data Services tightly integrated with EF
• Can we have WCF Data Services with our own data contracts (custom classes)? Any links to samples?
• If I implement WCF Data Services with custom classes (without using EF), does the methodology support oData standard?

thanks

Answer 1

WCF Data Service will happily serve up data from any data source, as long as it implements the IQueryable interface (and possible IUpdateable if you want to be able to update your existing data, too).

It's definitely not tied to EF only - you can use Linq-to-SQL or create your own custom provider for it - no problem.

Read up on MSDN's documentation on Data Services Providers for a start.

The main page on MSDN on WCF Data Services can be found here.