Data Services Joins the WCF Family

As announced at PDC, along with RIA Services, ADO.NET Data Services are also joining in the WCF brand. Data Services are REST-based web services that expose a data model that can be consumed by web clients. Data Services use URIs to address data from a storage system and supports a variety of formats for representing that data, such as JSON or ATOM.

The new name is WCF Data Services although there are no immediate product changes. Data Services already use WCF for communication and the current release plans are not changing. However, you may start seeing a closer unification in the future.

In celebration, I've added WCF Data Services to the WCF technology page right next to WCF RIA Services.

Pablo Castro did a session at PDC on WCF Data Services if you're interested in watching the video.

ADO.NET Data Services: What’s new with the RESTful data services framework by Pablo Castro

Join this code-heavy session to discuss the upcoming version of ADO.NET Data Services, a simple, standards-based RESTful service interface for data access. Come see new features in action and learn how Microsoft products are using ADO.NET Data Services to expose and consume Data Services to achieve their goals around data sharing.