Recommendations for .NET Web Service Format/Protocol for Android, iPhone, etc. integration

Question

I am building a web service for my ASP.NET MVC 3 website. Ideally I would like all clients (my web pages, iphone application, android application, windows phone 7 application, e

Answer 1

This would be a great opportunity for you to try out WCF Data services, together with Entity Framework. You can build it very fast, and it exposes your information model using the OData international standard in both XML and JSON flavor. The interface is accessible throught REST. No problems interacting with any front-end technology, fat, web or mobile clients.

AND, you have all the benefits of re-using your C# .NET knowledge, visual studio and created assemblies to also make more tighter integration with Windows applications if you need to. It certainly did the trick for me!

So:

1. Create your application model using Entity Framework. Either database first if you already have a physical datamodel, or model first is you are starting from scratch.
2. Expose the created information model using WCF dataservices (5 lines of code)

You can find a walkthrough at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee336128.aspx

Happy coding!