How to use Core EF to build Instant Web API? Daniel Jacobson, Director of Engineering at Netflix, writes in his influential API strategy book that REST should be the default choice for any new API you write today, and Google Insights reveals that REST overtook SOAP as the most popular API style in 2008, and has increased its dominance ever since. This pervasiveness of REST is one of its key strengths; you are not only choosing a technology, you are also joining an enormous ecosystem of tools, best practices and developers.
Benefits of REST Over SOAP. In addition to using HTTP for simplicity, REST offers a number of other benefits over SOAP: REST allows a greater variety of data formats, whereas SOAP only allows XML. Coupled with JSON (which typically works better with data and offers faster parsing), REST is generally considered easier to work with.
However, there are different opinions about if you should use links, or not… Vinay Sahni writes in his excellent blog post Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API that links are a good idea, but we are not ready to use them yet. On the other hand, the RESTful maturity model says that when you start using links you have reached the highest level of REST maturity. So what to do? Well, Dr. Roy Fielding, an expert on software architectures and the inventor of REST architectural style, flatly said on his blog that if you don’t use links it ain’t REST services, and he kindly encourages you to use another buzz word for your API!
Use Visual Studio 2017 to create an empty Web API project. Make sure you add unit tests to the solution. This empty solution will be used as a stub for the generated code. Step 2 Run InstantWebAPI application, select the stub Visual Studio solution file (.sln) created in first step. Using a database connection dialog create a connection string to your server. Application supports MS SQL server, Express or Azure. Once a connection is established to the database, select the tables or views for which Web API needs to created and start the code generator. Read extra info on Web API code generator from MS SQL.
