WCF Web API–Preview 4

At PDC 2010, Glenn Block announced a new WCF based library for building Web based Application Programming Interfaces (API) – the WCF Web API. One of it goals is to provide a “first class experience” for using  HTTP. The first preview of this library, including source code, was published at http://wcf.codeplex.com.

This week, at MIX 11, the WCF Web API Preview 4 was finally published, providing a more matured programming model and implementation. The source code is also available on a Mercurial repository. To clone it, just do hg clone https://hg01.codeplex.com/wcf.

In the next posts, I will present an overview of this new WCF library.

• Elementary programming model
• Self-hosting
• Self-hosting, HTTPS and HTTP Basic Authentication
• IIS Hosting
• HTTP Message classes
• Processing architecture
• HTTP Content classes
• Description model
• Handling requests asynchronously
• Message Handlers
• Operation Handlers

Note: Preview 5 was released on September, 2011. The next posts and demos are based on this new release.

• Custom parameter conversion