WCF services in
enterprises are used for developing distributed enterprise application.
There are lots of advantages of using WCF services. WCF service can be
exposed on multiple endpoints e.g. HTTP, TCP etc. and the client
applications have a choice to select the specific endpoint for the
communication. WCF 3.5 had introduced support for Representational State
Transfer (REST) using which the response from the service can be
directly send using Plain Old Xml form (POX).
If the WCF service is using REST/POX, then it is not necessary for the
client to consume the WCF service proxy. For REST, WCF introduced a new
binding i.e. WebHttpBinding. A client application that can do HTTP
communication and can process XML, could now directly make a call to the
WCF service and perform operations using XML.
And now the million
dollar question which motivated me to write this article – If an
existing service is already exposing SOAP using bindings like the
basicHttpBinding, then can the same service expose REST i.e. using
WebHttpBinding too? The answer is YES and in this article, I have
explained the same.