WCF DataContracts and underlying data structures

Question

I am wondering what makes sense in relation to what objects to expose through a WCF service - should I add WCF Serialization specifications to my business entities or should I i

Answer 1

In general, I think from a best practices standpoint, you should not expose the structure of your business objects as data contracts, but rather define "data contract-specific" classes and convert Business to Contract. It may require extra work, but from a separation of concerns and protection from change standpoint the extra work is probably worth it.

The Microsoft patterns & practices "Service Factory Modeling Edition" implements this, and also provides tooling to auto-generate Business <=> Contract converter classes -- it's an excellent VS add-in, and also represents Microsoft's best practices for WCF.