Book Image

WCF 4.0 Multi-tier Services Development with LINQ to Entities

By : Mike Liu
Book Image

WCF 4.0 Multi-tier Services Development with LINQ to Entities

By: Mike Liu

Overview of this book

WCF is the Microsoft model for building services, whereas LINQ to Entities is the Microsoft ORM for accessing underlying data storage. Want to learn both? You would normally have to dig through huge reference tomes—so wouldn't you agree that a simple-to-follow practical tutorial on WCF and LINQ to Entities is the way to get ahead?This book is the quickest and easiest way to learn WCF and LINQ to Entities in Visual Studio 2010. WCF and LINQ to Entities are both powerful yet complex technologies from Microsoft—but you will be surprised at how easily this book will get you get up and running with them.Mastery of these two topics will quickly enable you to create Service-Oriented applications, and allow you to take your first steps into the world of Service Oriented Architecture without becoming overwhelmed.Through this book, you will learn what's going on behind the scenes with WCF, and dive into the basic yet most useful techniques for LINQ to Entities. You will develop three real-world multi-tiered WCF services from beginning to end, with LINQ to Entities being used in the data access layer of the services. Various clients including windows console applications, the WCF Test Client, Windows Form applications and WPF applications will be created to test these WCF services. By the end of this book, you will be 100% confident that you know WCF and LINQ to Entities, not only in theory, but with sound real-world experience.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
WCF 4.0 Multi-tier Services Development with LINQ to Entities
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Chapter 9. Applying LINQ to Entities to a WCF Service

Now that we have learned all of the features related to LINQ and LINQ to Entities we will use them in the data access layer of a WCF service. We will create a new WCF service very similar to the one we created in the previous chapters but in this service we will use LINQ to Entities to connect to the Northwind database to retrieve and update a product.

In the data access layer we will use LINQ to Entities to retrieve product information from the database and return it to the business logic layer. You will see that with LINQ to Entities we will need only one LINQ statement to retrieve the product details from the database in the GetProduct method and we will no longer need to worry about the database connection or the actual query statement.

In this chapter, we will also learn how to update a product with LINQ to Entities in the data access layer. We will see how to attach an entity object to LINQ to Entities ObjectContext and leave all...