developing a restful server in .net

If you are familiar with MVC, then WebAPI is nice to use. Even if you're not familiar with MVC, I think WebAPI makes rest pretty straight-forward.You can do REST in WCF, buf it takes a bit of setup.

So if I was building something from the ground up, and wanted it to be restful, web api may be the way to go. I am at the very start of this project, and I have being playing around with trying to set up restful services using various examples, and I keep coming back to web api when I am doing my research.

Is there anything about WebAPI that you don't understand? Have you successfully set up a WebAPI project?

Another question on this same topic, any time I have worked with the database, I have used datatables. Is that a no no and if it is a no no, what is a better approach. Was looking EF but that just seems like a lot of set up and wondering how efficient it is.

I really want to keep all of the database related things inside stored procedures, and not so much in backend application code (c# or vb.net).

Thanks for your help so far on this, it has been greatly appreciated, I am starting to like this new web api more and more. Although, I will admit this MVC approach is a little confusing to me.

For example I have two public methods in my controller, where one of them takes a string as the parameter and another takes a numeric value. How does the webapi know which one to route my traffic to the appropriate method?

thank you for your help, greatly appreciated.