I don’t remember if I saw an answer for this when Code-First came out, so I’ll just ask here. What’s the future for RODL/Service Builder ? Is RODL going to be deprecated and eventually removed, so I should start new projects as Code-First, or will RODL/Service Builder continue to be supported as an option along with Code-First ?
you should use code-first for new projects, unless you have really good reasons not to (i’d love to hear about them), but deprecating RODL support is not anywhere on our roadmap.
First of all RODL is not going to be removed. Its main purpose is to serve as a simple (as opposed to some other formats) cross-platform way of defining a server API surface.
This means that CodeFirst servers too expose its API description using RODL.
The main purpose and idea of CodeFirst was not to remove RODL or Service Builder. The idea is to provide more coupled way of defining server API. Ie with older RODL/ServiceBuilder approach one had to first define method signatures and then to implement them in code. Now one can define service methods directly in code, add documentation/additional attributes to them etc. This makes server development faster, more error prone and (last but not the least) more friendly to code versioning systems.
I don’t have any good reason. It’s just that although I’ve owned RO for a while, I’ve never used it, so now that I’m maybe going to try it I was wondering if I should gain any familiarity with Service Builder and RODL or not. If RODL was going away, then I’d have no need to learn anything about it.