WebAPI – Stephen Haunts { Freelance Trainer and Writer }

I am a little late to the party with this one, but Microsoft recently announced the next version of ASP.NET MVC which will be version 6 and is code named vNext. What they are doing here is very cool and represents quite a major overhaul of the technology.

Here are the main features summarised :

Optimized for Cloud and on premise servers.
ASP.NET MVC and Web API have been merged into a single programming model.
New JSON based project structure.

No need to recompile for every change. Just hit save and refresh the browser.
- Compilation done with the new Roslyn real-time compiler.

Dependency injection out of the box.
Side by side deployment of the runtime and framework with your application.
Everything packaged with NuGet, Including the .NET runtime itself.
vNext is Open Source via the .NET Foundation and is taking public contributions.
vNext (and Rosyln) also runs on Mono, on both Mac and Linux today.

I especially like the fact that WebAPI is being merged with MVC as this will make a much easier and cleaner framework to use for full stack development. Rest based API’s are now pretty much the in-thing when it comes to programming your back-end, so it is good to see that Microsoft are making things easier there.

Read More “ASP.NET MVC 6 vNext”

It’s funny, when alternative technologies comes out that do a similar thing to a previous technology, people are very quick to pronounce the previous technology as dead. I was talking to someone the other week at a different company who said that their architects wanted to use WebAPI because WCF wasn’t relevant any more. This made me think, WHAT!!, REALLY!!, SURELY NOT!!

In the rest of this article I want to briefly cover what WCF and WebAPI are, talk a bit about the differences, and then suggest the reasons why you may use either. This isn’t an exhaustive discussion, but the point is that you can have various technologies doing similar things, without either one of them being redundant. I have spent the last 7 years of my career being involved in service architectures built using WCF and I am certainly not thinking I need to replace any of those systems just yet.