Is the WCF REST Starter Kit dead in the water?

Question

We are looking at switching from using WCF for our service layer in applications to REST.

So far we are assuming that the way to do this is to use the WCF REST Starter Kit. However this is still in Preview 2 and hasn't been updated since March 2009.

Is this project dead in the water?

If so, what alternatives do we have for creating .NET-based REST services? (Some are suggesting using ASP.NET MVC, which we're already using for our UI layer)

Edit

It looks like now, the WCF REST Starter Kit is indeed dead. The ASP.NET Web API is the recommended alternative.

Answer 1

We used WCF to implement a RESTFUL api, where we could post and receive data using XML, JSON and ProtoBuf. Same thing with GET.

However, once we looked at ASP.NET MVC we dumped WCF and are now using MVC to do the same thing with much more transparent code. There is some nice articles on google on how to do this. Our primary need was to give clients the option to serialize request and receive responses to XML, JSON, or Protobuf.

I would say WCF is dead to us. Long live MVC

Answer 2

We were building an app to consume our existing services. We also had a requirement to implement RESTful services but our main goal was to reuse/centralise our already existing WCF services, achieving reusability.

We then tried out the Web API and found it quite straight forward. It also provided us an additional layer to our architecture that we could also control.

We had performance concerns at first but so far, those have been quite minimal.

So, if you do not mind adding an additional layer on your WCF services, let it exist as a Web API layer, otherwise HttpClient is equally solid as an option.

Answer 3

It depends on your scenarios, but you'll find that WCF REST gets in your way quite a bit to enable certain scenarios.

The starter kit starts to fix some of those issues, others will be fixed with the next version, but if you want things link creation, content type negotiation and custom media types, you're going to be spending a lot of time making it work.

There are other frameworks out there that solve the same problem in a more straightforward fashion, I suggest you have a look at OpenRasta and Snooze, or even MVC.

Answer 4

I don't think it's going anywhere. It took 4 months to get from Preview 1 to Preview 2 and it's only been 3 months since then. Far from official, but this article names it as a highlight of Framework 4 - Beta 1. There was a PDC session on it as well. Too many organizations are using REST for their services to not have support in WCF.