The Astoria project was announced at MIX 2007, and the first developer preview was made available on April 30, 2007.
The final version was released as part of Service Pack 1 of the .NET Framework 3.5 on August 11, 2008.
The web service can be configured to return the data in either plain XML, JSON or RDF+XML.
In addition, using other HTTP methods like PUT, POST or DELETE, the data can be updated as well.
With WCF, we can define our service once and then configure it in such a way that it can be used via HTTP, TCP, IPC, and even Message Queues.
We can consume Web Services using server side scripts (ASP.NET), JavaScript Object Notations (JSON), and even REST (Representational State Transfer).
Once we have the answer to these three questions, then creating and consuming the WCF service will be a lot easier for us.
The contract is what defines the public data and interfaces that WCF service provides to the clients.
Filtering and partition information can also be encoded in the URL as Although the presence of skip and top keywords indicates paging support, in Data Services version 1 there is no method of determining the number of records available and thus impossible to determine how many pages there may be.