This was by far the most pragmatically useful of the sessions so far. We’ve just started using WebAPI and it’s clear that there’s loads more to it than we’re using. Of vital importance to me was an understanding of just how the magic works.

It seems to me that when you get into a new technology, it’s always pretty fraught. Or it should be, because you should be always asking yourself, ‘Am I doing this the right way? Is this the way that a pro would do it, or is it the way an amateur hacker would do it?’ Christian Weyer helped point me down the right path. Luckily, much of the things we’ve been doing are right, and the rest are easy to address.

First up, then — what is WebAPI and why do we care?

Well, WebAPI is a way to build HTTP APIs for your services. The HTTP API is designed to live between the client app — be it web page, console app, Windows Forms app, or iOS app — and provide all the business logic and database logic.

There are a raft of tips, so rather than smashing them all into one big blog post, I’m going to post things one at a time. I’ll tag them all `WebAPI` and `DevWeek` so you can search them out more easily.