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On September 7th I’ll be running a half-day tutorial on building RESTful Web services as part of the Skills Matter and London .NET User Group’s Progressive .NET Tutorials.

This will be a very hands-on tutorial. Over the course of three and a half hours we’ll build a hypermedia-driven service and client in .NET using the new WCF Web APIs. The subject matter hearkens back to a favourite subject of mine, Hydras and Hypermedia, for the application we’ll build will be a simple text-based pick-your-path-to-adventure game.

This isn’t a tutorial on games design, however. Despite the non-enterprisey subject matter, the tutorial serves to illustrate how machine clients and services can cooperate to achieve a useful application goal. Business application analogies lurk around every corner and surprise you with every encounter.

The tutorial comprises three exercises. With each exercise you’ll have to fix a number of broken unit and functional tests. Bit by bit, you’ll build a working application:

• Exercise 1: Here we implement the server resources that make up the dungeon - the chambers, tunnels and caves in which our daring client will venture.
• Exercise 2: Next we build a crafty client that can discover a path through the dungeon. By the end of the exercise, the client ought to be able to navigate the dungeon from entrance to exit.
• Exercise 3: Last, we add an element of danger, populating the dungeon with encounters (more resources) that the client must overcome before it achieves its application goal.

Along the way you’ll learn about:

• The Atom Syndication Format
• “What if” client-side intelligence
• The client as arbiter of application state
• Hypermedia controls: links, link relations and forms
• DRY URIs

So come and join me for what promises to be an entertaining hack-n-slash workshop. Attendees should be familiar with C# and unit testing, and have some knowledge of HTTP.

Full details and registration for the entire event can be found here.