WCF Web Services & iOS - Introduction
By Mike Gledhill
Damn.
I really hoped that I wouldn't need to write a lengthy set of articles about WCF Web Services, and getting an iOS device to talk to them. Given the number of years that both technologies have been around, I would've hoped enough clear, easy to follow and complete articles had been written already.
Apparently not.
To-do list
On the following pages, I'm going to annoy both Microsoft and Apple, by showing how to synchronise data from Microsoft's beloved
Northwind SQL Server database onto an iPhone.
It's what they would've wanted.
Along the way, we are going to learn:
- How to create your first JSON WCF Web Service in Visual Studio.
- How to get your JSON WCF web service to return data from SQL Server.
- How to write a JSON WCF web service to save data back to SQL Server, and test it using Fiddler.
- How to load and display your JSON data using JavaScript.
- How to load and display your JSON data using AngularJS.
- How to write iOS code to retrieve data from these services.
ASP.Net Framework 4.5
This tutorial uses an example created in Visual Studio 2013, with ASP.Net Framework 4.5.
You can still read the older version of this tutorial, based on ASP.Net Framework 3.5, by clicking here.
What's the point?
If there's one über-useful thing I've learned over these past few years it's that, once you have your data in a SQL Server database, it's very easy to write some services to load/save it using JSON, and then, the world is your oyster (and your colleagues will love you).
With data in JSON format, you can show & edit your data on webpages or in mobile apps, and you can ditch slow-loading ASP.Net
GridView controls, and throw in some AngularJS code, to make your webpages fast, easy-to-read
and maintainable.
And it all starts here, with getting your SQL Server data in a format which the outside world will understand.
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