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can we pass data from mobile phone application (iPhone app / Android app) to ASP.NET website application? Does it need to be on a secure channel like SSL? ASP.NET website, I was thinking of having a WCF service to get data from the mobile phone application, but what would be the better data format? REST? Json? Plain text?

Tay Yi Keong
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If you host a WCF service, then the natural choice would be SOAP. In that case, you don't have to care about the format at all, as the code for calling your web methods will be generated automatically if you use an appropriate SOAP library. See this SO question to get some ideas for iOS and this question for Android.

SSL is normally a good thing to have, especially when you care about your users' security (which you should).

Community
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Dmytro Shevchenko
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  • Well, thank you Shedal. SOAP sounds ok, but I have another question, if SSL, should the SSL implement on the WCF service application? I'm still not that familiar with the SSL stuff especially with WCF. Or is there such thing as mobile app to have SSL secure connection? – Tay Yi Keong Apr 12 '12 at 07:58
  • I think that if you use a good SOAP client library, it should support SSL out of the box. On the server side, SSL is not related to WCF. Instead, you set it up with means of the web server (IIS). There are many instructions on how to do that. E.g.: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/144/how-to-set-up-ssl-on-iis/ – Dmytro Shevchenko Apr 12 '12 at 08:01
  • And of course, you would need to buy an SSL certificate for your web domain name. But to start with and to test, you can create the web service first, and add SSL security later. – Dmytro Shevchenko Apr 12 '12 at 08:02