How to design a public API in ASP.Net?

Question

I'm currently developing a web application in ASP.Net with SQL Server and I would like to have some sort of public API so that my users can get their data and manipulate it at their own will.

I've never done something like this, can you recomend some guidelines for me to follow?

Answer 1

You are going to want to look into web services. Here is a good article that shows you how to create RESTful WCF services. Uising RESTful services will allow your users to invoke API methods in your service with nice clean URLs.

Answer 2

WCF is the way to go- you can use SOAP / REST services - since you are planning a public API using REST is the right way to go - the following links from MSDN (starter kit and lab) will get you started http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/cc950529.aspx http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wcfrestlabs

Answer 3

Here is a good start :

How do design a Good API and Why it Matters

Answer 4

I recently discovered Hessian and I like it so far. It doesn't use XML so it's faster and there are libraries for quite a few different languages.

http://hessian.caucho.com/

http://www.hessiancsharp.org/

EDIT:

The Netbeans podcast had the author of this API book not too long ago: http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/Main_Page

Answer 5

Omar AlZaber write a nice article for Create REST API using ASP.NET MVC that speaks both Json and plain Xml.

Answer 6

You could try using Microsoft's new Dynamic Data services for ASP.NET. It might be exactly what you're looking for. I'm not terribly familiar with it other than that I think it takes care of a lot of the framework code you would have to build to use ASP.NET REST for an API.

http://www.asp.net/dynamicdata/