web service and entity framework

Question

Ive been playing around with the entity framework with an idea for creating a web service to be consumed by an application in sharepoint that a 3rd party developer is creating. Basically i need to return a list of jobs eg list based on some search criteria. I wanted to use the EF so i have something scalable however it seems returning POCO's from a web service is harder than i imagined it to be. Are web services and EF / POCO's meant to work together. Does anyone have any good examples or can point me to some.

Answer 1

Are web services and EF / POCO's meant to work together.

Yes. The only thing you must to ensure is to make your entities serializable - POCO entities can contain circular references which are not serializable by default.

What about consuming the web service? I read somewhere that the consumer has to reference the entity namespace to use the returned objects.

This is not true with POCOs. This is only true with Self tracking entities .