Is data contract evil?

Hey everybody, im working on a WCF service. The job of the service is
to implimente a industry standard for communication in the powergrid.
This implies that different platforms and enviroments must be able to
use my service.

Now doubt that WCF is conforming to alot of new ws.* standards, but
what about datacontracts..
According to john Cavnar-johnsons blog
(http://pluralsight.com/blogs/johncj/.../04/9742.aspx), the

use of datacontract is restricting the use of my webservice to wcf.


So I guess that I should just specifi my data as i did with the
serializer earlier on.


Do any of you guess know if using datacontract is that restrictive as
he writes?


Besvar »

I donot know what exactly your issue is here, but as far as WCF datacontracts
are concerned, they are a simplified version of XMLSerializer which we used
in asmx web services. Using Datacontract you can control the name, order and
the IsRequired attributes of an element, but thats about it. If you want to
do something more sophisticated, then u need to fall back to the
XMLSerializer. You can indicate your need to use the XMLSerializer by
annotating the service interface with [XmlSerializerFormat]. This makes it
much easier for you to move your existing asmx service forward to WCF.
--
Anil
Technical Lead


"R.A.B" wrote:

>
> Hey everybody, im working on a WCF service. The job of the service is
> to implimente a industry standard for communication in the powergrid.
> This implies that different platforms and enviroments must be able to
> use my service.
>
> Now doubt that WCF is conforming to alot of new ws.* standards, but
> what about datacontracts..
> According to john Cavnar-johnsons blog
> (http://pluralsight.com/blogs/johncj/.../04/9742.aspx), the
>
> use of datacontract is restricting the use of my webservice to wcf.
>
>
> So I guess that I should just specifi my data as i did with the
> serializer earlier on.
>
>
> Do any of you guess know if using datacontract is that restrictive as
> he writes?
>
>
> Besvar »
>
>