How to build WCF REST services with .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2010?

Question

I'm about to build some RESTful web services using WCF and .NET 3.5 in VS2010. I've not done this before so am looking for some pointers as to the easiest approach.

For deployment reasons I cannot use .NET 4 but must stick with .NET 3.5 SP1. It seems the WCF REST Starter Kit doesn't work with VS 2010 (I'm not certain about this - maybe it's just the project templates don't work), and people generally use the stuff found in .NET 4.0 instead. I've not build REST services before, but based on this fantastic article (A Guide to Designing and Building RESTful Web Services with WCF 3.5) it seems like the starter kit classes do a bunch of useful plumbing that will save me time instead of using the base classes. My question is: should I try to use these helper classes that come with the WCF REST Starter Kit or should I just use the standard WCF classes?

Answer 1

Hi,

The RSK preview is not production quality - so I would go for the vanilla WCF 3.5 WebHttpBinding-style service.

Pablo "cibrax" Cibraro wrote a great blog post a few days ago regarding different Microsoft stacks available to write RESTful services: http://weblogs.asp.net/cibrax/archive/2010/10/08/asp-net-mvc-wcf-rest-and-data-services-when-to-use-what-for-restful-services.aspx

--larsw