Create WCF service step by step ~ Programming Share

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is an SDK for developing and deploying services on Windows. WCF provides a runtime environment for our services, allow us to display CLR types as services, and to take other services as CLR types. In this post, I will to guide how to implement restful service API using WCF 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010 step by step.

Step 1: Launch Visual Studio 2010 and click on File->New-> Project. Then, select WCF in Visual C# tab and click on WCF Service Application.

Step 2: By default WCF service and interface file have been already created. Delete these files as we will create our own interface and WCF service file.

Step 3: Right click on Solution and create one new WCF service file, name it "WCFWebService.svc".

Step 4: Add the following code to "IWCFWebService.cs" file. This is an interface that enable the data to be returned. In this scenario, we will let the data return as XML format

[ServiceContract]
    public interface IWCFWebService
    {
        [OperationContract]
        [WebInvoke(Method = "GET",
            ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Xml,
            BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Wrapped,
            UriTemplate = "xml/{id}")]
        string XMLDoc(string id);
    }

Step 5: Add the following code to "WCFWebserivce.cs" file:

public class WCFWebService : IWCFWebService
    {
        public string XMLDoc(string id)
        {
            return "Your requested product: " + id;
        }
    }

Step 6:
Finally, open the "web.config" file, there will be two basic sections of the configurations file that we must to know:

1. Service: This section contains information about the End Point. Modifying it as follow:

<system.serviceModel>
    <services>
      <service name="WCF.WCFWebService" behaviorConfiguration="WCFWebServiceBehaviour">
        <endpoint address="" binding="webHttpBinding" contract="WCF.IWCFWebService" behaviorConfiguration="web">

        </endpoint>

      </service>
    </services >

2. Behaviour: This section contains information about service and endpoint behavior. Modifying it as follow:
<behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="WCFWebServiceBehaviour">
                    <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>
                    <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false"/>
        </behavior>
      </serviceBehaviors>
      <endpointBehaviors>
        <behavior name="web">
          <webHttp/>
        </behavior>
      </endpointBehaviors>
    </behaviors>

TEST THE SERVICE NOW

Right click on the file "WCFWebService.svc", the web service will display as follow:

Then, on the address bar, if we type the URL "http://localhost:59540/WCFWebService.svc/XML/A001", we get the following response on the browser in an XML format: