WCF is the latest technology from Microsoft for building services. In this chapter, we will explain what WCF is, and what it is composed of. We will also explain various .NET runtimes, .NET frameworks, Visual Studio versions, the relationships between them, and what is needed to develop or deploy WCF services. You will see some code snippets in this chapter that will help you to further understand WCF concepts, although they are not in a completed WCF project. Once we have grasped the basic concepts of WCF, we will develop a complete WCF service and create a client application to consume it in the next chapter.
For now, let us discuss the following in detail:
- What WCF is
- Use of WCF for SOA
- WCF architecture
- Basic WCF concepts
WCF is the acronym for Windows Communication Foundation. It is Microsoft's latest technology that enables applications in a distributed environment to communicate with each other.
WCF is Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. It enables developers to build secure, reliable, transacted solutions that integrate across platforms and interoperate with existing investments. WCF is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and simplifies the development of connected systems. It unifies a broad array of distributed systems capabilities in a composable,
extensible architecture that supports multiple transports, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies, and hosting models. It is the next version of several existing products ASP.NET's web methods (ASMX) and Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE) for Microsoft .NET, .NET Remoting, Enterprise Services, and System.Messaging.
The purpose of WCF is to provide a single programming model that can be used to create services on the .NET platform for organizations.