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I'm going to be working on a project that involves a number of elements:
ASP.NET MVC website
C# console application
iPhone App
To get all these separate applications talking to the database, my immediate thought was to use a WCF Service.
However, I now need to add an API to the site to allow third parties to select, insert and update records from their own applications.
In my mind, I would just create a separate RESTful service endpoint on my WCF Service which would be locked down using authentication and would only give access to certain methods.
However, I've been reading today about the Web API feature in MVC 4 which is meant to be the latest thing for RESTful APIs?
Should I be going along the line of using the Web API? or because my other applications need a web service, should I stick with a WCF Service?
If you intend to do RESTful development then you will definitely want to use the ASP.Net Web Api (which was originally called WCF Web Api and created with the goal of "Making REST a first class citizen in .NET".
Another thing to consider is that the WCF REST Starter kit is no longer supported.
Note that using Web Api doesn't mean you have to use ASP.Net MVC or IIS even as it can be self hosted.
For handling operations which are non-CRUD in nature I'd recommend Googling "REST non-CRUD". I found this blog post RESTful URLs for non-CRUD operations (and particularly the comments interesting). If you decide you NEED to have RPC calls then those may have to be done with WCF. That said since WCF REST is being killed off I'm not sure what the best solution is going to be. Having both is probably the best answer but at the same time it's not necessarily a good answer.
Another alternative would be a WCF OData Service but I'm not sure if that gets any support from an iPhone.
One last point to make (that can be deleted in the future as this is time sensitive)
Microsoft has provided a Go Live license with the beta which means that it is supported by Microsoft and you shouldn't have any problems upgrading to the file RTM.
Service Stack also looks like an option.
Demos, overview, examples is available here.
There's no right answer here. You can certainly do fairly well with a WCF RESTful service. Or you could use ASP.NET MVC. Both are perfectly valid, and both have strengths and weaknesses.
Ultimately, I'd suggest you go with whatever feels the most maintainable to you.
I would like to note that MVC 4 is in beta, so watch out for bugs and don't go live until it's out of beta.
Since you are going to create an ASP.NET MVC web site, it would be quite comfortable to use ASP.NET Web API also because programming model is very similar and those solutions are more or less integrated with each other.
I would be inlclined to look at what has the best support on all platforms that you are going to use, I suspect the iPhone app may end up driving your choices.
If it was pure .net I would still tend to lean toweards a SOAP service - it is not considered cool these days but it generally will do what you need on most platforms without having to roll custom solutions.
EDIT
ASP.NET Web API means that .NET now provides a great framework for developing a restful API, I revise my answer to say that I would now lean towards this - progress is great!
I have the same question.
In the MSDN site,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj823172(v=vs.110).aspx
Found a video tutorial where they said that for machine cosumption like iPhone or web app clients of JSON or xml, web API is recommended option. Its around the last part of the video.
While for more complex machine to machine communication WCF is prefereable.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Web-Apps-with-ASP-NET-Jump-Start/Building-Web-Apps-with-ASPNET-Jump-Start-04-Building-a-Service-Layer-with-ASPNET-Web-API
Here is a screenshot from their presentation.
Related
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I was told to integrate our application with QuickBook Desktop version. When i checked about that, Connecting via WebConnector seems promising. But all the documents and samples are created with WebService.
But i want to implement the functionalities with WebAPI. Is that possible and that will work without any issues (still in research, so i haven't tried it yet)? i have searched for reference but no help. May be i looked in wrong places.
Secondly, the webservice example uses qbXML to send and receive data with WebConnector. Is there any possibility that i can use Interop library QBFC ?
Any help appreciated thanks.
Note: I have referred the Samples and Docs that comes with SDK
But all the documents and samples are created with WebService.
You should use the Web Connector, which requires you to implement a SOAP web service.
But i want to implement the functionalities with WebAPI.
No, QuickBooks desktop does not support a REST API of any sort natively (though if you want to pay, Autofy http://www.propelware.com/ has a solution for you).
i have searched for reference but no help. May be i looked in wrong places.
You should probably start with Intuit's documentation. There's literally a 100+ page PDF on specifically the top of integrating via the Web Connector, and several hundred more pages on QuickBooks integration in general - install the SDK and look at the included PDF docs:
https://developer.intuit.com/docs/0200_quickbooks_desktop/0100_essentials/0000_overview
Is there any possibility that i can use Interop library QBFC ?
QBFC can generate qbXML requests. So you can use that to generate qbXML requests, yes.
You'll still have to implement some web service components though - you can't use QBFC to natively talk to QuickBooks desktop from a web app.
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When ASP.NET MVC came, Microsoft announced many times in many places that it wasn't supposed to replace ASP.NET Web Forms. In other words, it's just another technology that you might find useful, or you might use Web Forms in other scenarios.
However, as companies enter into the market, they can't have a jungle of technologies, because that's too expensive. They usually select a mature technology, stick to it, build on it and extend it and reuse elements in it to reduce costs.
Now we're trying to decide to move to Owin/Katana from Web API. We just wonder if it's OK that we move 100% to Owin?
The reason I'm asking this question is because we've created a very rich codebase for Web API, including streaming, compression, authentication, normalization of UGC, support of I18N & L10N, and more.
If we want to move to Owin, we need to re-create these facilities/utilities again for Owin, because its architecture is different from Web API.
We want to move to Owin, because it's faster, lighter, self-hosted server, and seems to be the future of service technologies from Microsoft.
Is it safe for us to move to Owin completely and imagine a future in which all of our services are delivered through Owin, and we discontinue using Web API?
OWIN is just a specification, nothing more. It describes a common interface that servers and applications can both use, so that applications don't need to be tightly coupled to servers.
Katana was the first step towards decoupling ASP.NET from IIS. Work on Katana has stopped now, according to the official roadmap. The ideas and technologies developed for Katana have made their way into the next version of ASP.NET (ASP.NET Core).
It rarely makes sense to build applications on top of OWIN itself, because you're operating at the lowest level of abstraction above HTTP (literally dealing with raw requests and responses). That's usually only necessary if you are building middleware components that need low-level access.
In other words: you shouldn't rebuild your application on OWIN, because you'd be spending a lot of time reinventing all of the stuff already in ASP.NET.
ASP.NET Core is the next evolution of ASP.NET and Web API. It has all the things you mentioned: it's fast, lightweight, and can self-host. If you need to rebuild your architecture, do it on ASP.NET Core.
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I'm not found answer for my question - and opened this topic.
So I want develop project.
Database:
Or Couchbase or SQL Server (right now it is not important, but I think it will be Couchbase)
Website:
Asp .NET MVC + Angular etc. - Simple Website
Web Api:
ASP .NET WebAPI
**Mobile Application (This is hard side for me)**
I'm a good C# developer - it's a reason why I want write Application by Xamarin.
If its bad idea - tell me (and tell me WHY IS BAD IDEA)
if is good framework, I have a few question:
1) How work with API
2) Or I need write for each platform(iOS, Android, WP) - service (like WCF) = (3 services?)
3) Which way better for Authentication (I want give to user option Registration by FB, Google, What's Up, etc...)
I dont know, maybe you can give me links for good topics, or same question here (I'm not found)
Or maybe you can give me a name of good course on Lynda or plularsight?
Thank you.
With ASP.NET Web API you can make a REST web service working through HTTP protocol. Any platform which supports HTTP protocol, can consume your web service.
You need only one web service for all platforms.
In current ASP.NET Web API version, you can use ASP.NET Identity which supports local account and external account through OAuth.
For example, this post shows how to consume a ASP.NET Web API in Android. And this one is about how to use external account for authentication. There're some more posts in that blog discussing about ASP.NET Web API, just spend some minutes flying over it, you'll find some useful infos.
I have no experience with Xamarin so I can't say anything about it. I write mobile app in their native platforms (Android with Java, IOS with Objective C++).
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I'm new to C# and decided to write a small client server chat application to approach the new language with learn by doing.
The question I have now is whats the best way to code the server part on.
The client is built with C# and for now a MySQL connection to my hosting server(Linux).
But i realized this is a dumb way to go at it.
So I was thinking of writing a server part that all clients connect to and that server will have a MSSQL connection and handle all the requests and chat delegation.
So the options I'm thinking about is either
WCF Service (as I understood they can be installed on any IIS server)
Windows Service (don't know if you can run this on hosts online)
ASP.NET WebService (This would actually only by a website that takes requests)
Node.js with socket.io
Other options?
What do you guys think would be the best approach for his?
To keep in mind is that I would like this server to be hosted online without spending tons of money on a VPS-Server or similar.
As the most productive solution, you should probably go with SignalR (http://signalr.net/), or ServiceStack (https://servicestack.net).
Both "frameworks" are fully mono compatible, so you can run the solution you build on your linux-server.
As an ORM-Mapper, you could use the EntityFramework, which would allow you to use not only your linux-server, but also your MySQL-DB. See this blog-post for more details: http://blog.3d-logic.com/2013/04/14/entity-framework-6-on-mono/
Depending on your "other language"-knowledge, you want probabbly to start off with no framework at all, but to build everything from scratch.
Maybe it was just me, but I learned the most about how .net works, as I had to "rebuild" stuff like linq, etc.
You can also consider:
ServiceStack
ASP .Net Web Api
Windows Service is not a technology, it is may be using as host (IIS, Windows service)
The easiest way to get started is to stay in the Microsoft walled garden and adhere there their ideas about how this should be done. Microsoft developer products integrate exceptionally well.
Probably a console application connecting to a WCF service connecting to a SQL Server using Entity Framework.
This is rather straight-forward to set up. Tutorials for this are available in heaps. Make sure to use recent tutorials and try to stay simple.
I advise against writing a chat because that requires either polling or a push mechanism. I think that is unnecessary for a beginner project. Write a data-driven application like a to-do list. Get fancy later. The first steps are hard enough.
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We have a c#net windows application. now our company decided to develop a web application using asp.net to support some of the windows application functionality on the world wide web.
so we are going to deploy some services in our windows application an let the web application to use them.
Which one is the better choice : deploying WCF services or Web services ?
Web Services is a name for services that are reachable over the web infrastructure. Classically that has meant SOAP services, but the last years REST and REST-style (JSON over HTTP but not employing full REST semantics) have grown more popular.
So first you have to choose what kind of API you want to expose: SOAP or JSON over HTTP.
Second, you need a suitable framework for implementing such a services for SOAP services WCF is the right choice. asmx services are deprecated. For JSON over HTTP you can use WCF, but WebApi is easier to work with.
WCF are more complex and powerful than ASMX. However, that also means it takes a lot more effort to write them and a lot more knowledge to handle them. ASMX are super easy to write. Unless you specifically need features in WCF, go with ASMX. That said, there's also the option of ASP.NET Web Api which is the most recent service framework. It's similar to ASMX but much smarter and nicer to work with. I would recommend Web Api if you can use it in your situation.