Consuming Data Using WCF Data Services

Abstract

Technologists invested their time trying to expose data as service over nearly the entire past decade. In doing so, the focus was inadvertently shifted from “data” to application logic. There are numerous reasons for this. While the need was for enterprises to distribute data to their partners and to consumers, there were concerns centering on security and transactions that led the shift in focus to Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)-style operations. The RPC style provided the much-needed abstraction for accessing and manipulating data, but it wasn’t intuitive for consumers. As a result, metadata had to be provided to consumers to help them understand the operations they could perform.