WCF Web APIs Roundup - Volume 1

A little over a month ago we launched our new WCF Web Apis on Codeplex. Since then a bunch of folks in the community (and some internal folks) have been posting about their own explorations / thoughts of the new bits. it’s great to see the work that they are doing! I am going to start aggregating these and periodically (I am not committing to a cadence but am aiming for monthly) post pointers to whatever I find. Appreciate any suggestions to the format.

Blogs

• On WCF Web Apis
  • Microsoft WCF gets serious about HTTP – Darrel Miller shares his thoughts on the new WCF Web Apis, it’s importance, and how it compares aganst other offerings within the .NET stack.
  • Okay, WCF we can be friends now – Jon Galloway gives an overview of the new features in WCF Web Apis including HTTP enhancements and jQuery support..
  • New IQueryable Support for HTTP Services in WCF – Pablo Cibraro explores the new query composition feature we’re adding to enable LINQ to WCF type scenarios.
• Using Processors
  • Http Processors in the new WCF Programming Model – Pablo describes the new processor api that we’ve introduced for addressing HTTP specific concerns in a cross-cutting fashion. He demonstrates how to use processors for transforming a portion of the URI into a CultureInfo object.
  • Versioning REST services with WCF HTTP Processors – Pablo describes an approach for versioning with media types. Processors are used to transform a portion of the media type into a version with the operation uses to returned a versioned response.
  • Combine WCF MedaTypeProcessors with a Custom Razor Host – Steve Michelotti describes how you can create a processor which uses the new ASP.NET Razor engine to render an HTML response.
  • WCF Media Processor + Speech API = SpeechProcessor fun – Jon Galloway illustrates how to plug in a custom processor for rendering a representation using the .NET Speech API. Using the processor allows one to use the new HTML 5 Audio tag or to point windows media player at a resource and have it literally "say” the response. Jon also does a great overview of how MediaTypeProcessors work and the value of supporting multiple formats.
  • Using JSON.NET as a default serializer in WCF HTTP/Web/REST (vNext) – Christian Weyer shows how to replace the default JSON serializer in WCF Web APIs with a custom serializer that uses the popular Json.NET library. In addition to supporting JSON,he also shows how to support BSON (binary JSON)

Other cool things to note

• WCF Http Contrib –  A new codeplex site for contributions to WCF Web Apis.
• WCF Web Apis are on nuget! – If you want to quickly get going with using the new APIs in your projects, nuget is the answer! We’ve posted two nuget packages. Note: Run both packages from the nuget command shell as they execute powershell scripts for registering gaced WCF assemblies. 
  • WcfWebApis – This package contains binaries for WcfWebApis. Installing it will add appropriate project references for WCF and the new apis and will update the web.config.
  • WcfResource – This package depends on WcfWebApis and contains the convention based resource model prototype I blogged about recently. The model supports conventions, code-based configuration and provides hooks for using an IoC containers.