Summary

In this chapter, we stepped through the initial installation and configuration of your first WCF services. We then provided background on service contracts, on data contracts, on different aspects of how WCF deals with serialization, and on important aspects of distributed computing.

We focused purely on the implementation details and not the actual hosting. The samples for this chapter all run either within IIS hosting or directly under the ASP.NET development server that comes with Visual Studio 2005.

So, the next chapter will cover the hosting options and the details associated with some of those options. What's important to take away from this chapter is the separation and decoupling of those who implement the service logic and those responsible for deployment and hosting. This provides solution designers with a framework that reduces bias based upon platform or implementation restrictions.