WCF Data Service

Question

Hi Why did Microsoft rename ADO.net Data Services to WCF Data Services? Thanks

Jaganathan Bantheswaran · Answer

Hi From MSDN Why did you rename ADO.NET Data Services to WCF Data Services? A: As you've probably observed we've been working hard over the past year or so to grow our application stacks to better support the types of applications (Silverlight rich desktop AJAX etc) and services (SOAP REST etc) that are required to build modern robust solutions. A few of the technologies we have introduced over the past few years help in building services and n-tier applications: Windows Communication Foundation  .NET RIA Services and ADO.NET Data Services . We've been very pleased to see each of these stacks be well received in the community and given that positive feedback we've been eagerly working on expanding each based on your comments. While today these stacks target different application scenarios and/or levels of abstraction we see opportunities to align their foundations by building the concepts shared in each stack (authentication conventions for business logic logging configuration etc) on a single foundation. Additionally we've heard your feedback that traversing our offerings in this space is at times too complicated. So with the goal of simplifying our platform by aligning common components we announced a few changes we'll be making to achieve our goals…. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) == your one stop shop for building services and n-tier applications Since .NET Framework 3.0 WCF has been the place to go to in the .NET Framework to rapidly build service-oriented applications that communicate across the web and the enterprise. As we developed the product roadmaps for .NET RIA Services and ADO.NET Data Services we found that they complement the core WCF stack quite well as components/extensions for WCF or as new top-level layers of abstraction. To formalize our direction in aligning these technologies we made a few name changes in the .NET Framework 4 timeframe. ADO.NET Data Services changed its name slightly to be WCF Data Services and .NET RIA Services is now known as WCF RIA Services . We think of these name changes as a key first step in simplifying our offerings in this space.