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

Summary


In this chapter, we have used LINQ to Entities to communicate with the database in the data access layer rather than use the raw ADO.NET APIs. We have used only one LINQ statement to retrieve product information from the database and, as you have seen, the updates with LINQ to Entities prove to be much easier than with the raw ADO.NET data adapters. Now, WCF and LINQ are combined together for our services so we can take advantage of both technologies.

The key points covered in this chapter include:

  • The data access layer can be modeled with the LINQ to Entities designer.

  • Business entity classes are all located inside the LINQ to Entities designer file within the data access layer.

  • It is better to separate our own entities classes from the generated entities classes so we can decouple the data access layer from the service interface layer.

  • Client applications still communicate with the service by exchanging messages. The LINQ to Entities objects are not exposed to clients and the technology...