Chapter 5 The Service Layer 209 your service layer. Are they going to be plain classes or services? And if you opt for services, which service technology should you use? On the Windows and .NET platforms, you have quite a few options. You can opt for traditional WCF services, ASP.NET XML Web services, or perhaps REST-like services. (To learn more about REST services, see http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Representational_State_Transfer.) If you’re only a little bit familiar with the .NET Framework, you should know that creating a service—be it a WCF service or a Web service—is nearly as easy as creating a plain class decorated with a few attributes. Sure, there are a lot more details to take into account—such as the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interface for Web services and configuration and data contracts for WCF services—but a service is ultimately a class with something around it. Where does this take us?