Summary

This chapter introduced the concepts of services and SOA. We also described the governing principles for services, in terms of the four tenets. It is important to understand that at the end of the day SOA is not about how to invoke objects remotely or how to write web services; it is all abouthow to send messages from one application to another in a loosely coupled fashion. Web services are just one of the many, albeit the most popular, ways to send messages between disparate systems. Adopting an SOA approach is important to an enterprise to help it deliver the business agility and IT flexibility needed to be able to succeed in today's marketplace.

The next chapter will introduce you to the new features of WCF, the challenges it helps solve, and the unification of the various distributed technologies. We will also illustrate how WCF addresses SOA concepts to promote WCF as a practical SOA implementation from Microsoft.