chapter 7 WCF Data Services O riginally code named "Astoria" and formally known as ADO.NET Data Services, WCF Data Services is part of the .NET Framework that provides the ability to create Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services that use the Atom Publishing protocol (AtomPub) and Open Data protocol (OData) to expose and consume data over the web. WCF Data Services exposes data by using the semantics of representational state transfer (REST). OData provides the ability to perform create, retrieve, update, and delete (CRUD) operations and can be used on a variety of sources such as relational databases, file sys- tems, content management systems, and traditional websites.