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

LINQ to Entities


Now let's have a look at what LINQ to Entities is.

LINQ to Entities provides Language Integrated Query (LINQ) support that enables developers to write queries against Entity Framework conceptual model using Visual Basic or Visual C#. Queries against the Entity Framework are represented by command-tree queries which execute against the object context. LINQ to Entities converts Language Integrated Queries (LINQ) queries to command-tree queries, executes the queries against Entity Framework, and returns objects that can be used by both Entity Framework and LINQ.

LINQ to Entities allows developers to create flexible, strongly-typed queries against the Entity Data Model (EDM) by using LINQ expressions and standard LINQ query operators. To certain degrees, LINQ to Entities is similar to LINQ to SQL, but LINQ to Entities is a true ORM product from Microsoft and it supports more features than LINQ to SQL, such as multiple-table inheritance. LINQ to Entities also supports many other...