REST with WCF

Ron Jacobs did a section (within the WCF pre-conference session) on REST and how WCF/Microsoft supports it.

Discussed the difference between HI-Rest and Lo-Rest. Refers to how pragmatic VS purist you are in terms of adhering to the REST principles.

The Microsoft position:
- SOAP is great
- REST is great
- Use WCF to build either and go in peace

MS promotes REST esp. in usage scenarios where you care about making the service available and accessible. (e.g. invoke a service with Notepad..)

WCF support for REST:
- WebGet and WebInvoke keywords
- URI Templates - allows you to override WCF default URI's
- behaviours - webHttp and enableWebScript (Ajax friendly and ASP.NET friendly)

Microsoft announces a "REST starter kit" tomorrow.

Usage of this toolkit was demonstrated in the session. It seems to contain support for making it easy (i.e. few lines of programming) to adhere to the REST principles (e.g. returning correct RESTful statuscodes, providing URI templates etc.)
The toolkit adds Microsoft.ServiceModel.Web