Should a WCF service return an EntityObject or a POCO/DTO class?
I've been looking at a lot of WCF examples using EntityFramework and most of them seem to return some kind of POCO or DTO class to the client. I was wondering why this was since the default EntityObject includes the [DataContract] attributes and implements INotifyPropertyChanged . Is returning a DTO or POCO class better than an EntityObject (or vise versa)? And is there specific instances where it is better to use one return value over another? As a best practice, you should definitely have it return a DTO/POCO class that is explicitly designed as a data contract and has no persistence logic.