GETTING STARTED BUILDING A WCF WEB SERVICE

This post is one in a series of upcoming MSDN articles.  It shows how to create a very simple web service using Windows Communications Founcation (WCF).  There is one special characteristic of the web service that I present in this article, which is that while it is very simple, it can be consumed as an External Content Type (ECT) from Business Connectivity Services (BCS).  In addition, the procedure presented in this post shows how to host this web service using Internet Information Services (IIS).

The subject of the series is creating a claims-aware web service and consuming it from SharePoint BCS.  In the short time that I’ve worked with claims-based authentication, what I experience is that while there are not very many steps to get it working, if you get anything wrong, then it just doesn’t work, and it takes some effort to figure out the problem.  My approach in these articles is to supply some procedures with small steps, with instructions all along the way to validate that what you have done so far works properly.  So the first step is to create a WCF web service, host it using IIS, and validate that it is working.

In the second article, I’m going to add some Windows Identity Framework (WIF) capabilities, so that the web service can report on the identity of the user of the web service.

In the third article, I’ll walk through consuming the web service from BCS.

In the fourth article, I’ll show how to move the web service to a different machine, make it claims-aware, and then again, consume it from BCS.  This solves the ‘double hop’ problem.

As usual, after these blog posts are published as MSDN articles, I’ll update posts with a links to the MSDN articles.

This web service contains only two methods: a ‘finder’ to retrieve a collection of items, and a ‘specific finder’ to retrieve a single item.  The ‘database’ behind the collection is just an initialized list.  The ‘schema’ of this little ‘database’ is very simple.  It is a single flat table consisting of two fields – an integer CustomerID, and a string CustomerName.  CustomerID is a unique ID.

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