Installing and Creating WCF Services

This chapter introduces how to implement WCF services. Much can be said about what constitutes a good service and a strong SOA architecture—Chapter 1 addresses those principles. Additionally, many have described web services and SOA as synonyms. We hope we've altered that perspective to clearly indicate that web services are an implementation model for SOA, just as message-oriented middleware and other loosely coupled technologies have provided in the past.

This chapter identifies the installation and configuration requirements of WCF and then presents a simplified set of examples for creating different types of contracts for services that are part of the QuickReturns Ltd. sample implementation. This chapter focuses primarily on the following:

• The requirements for WCF on the Windows XP, 2003, and Vista operating systems

• Creating WCF services and proxies using Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 3.0 Framework tools

To illustrate the simplified model, this chapter doesn't discuss the variations of how you can host the service. We'll explain that in more detail in later chapters.

WCF allows the abstraction and decoupling of a service's functionality from the actual transport protocols and physical characteristics of the communication interfaces. Prior chapters covered the ABCs of WCF, but here we'll focus on creating services. We will also more deeply dive into the technical aspects of the WCF programming model from this chapter onward.