Beginning Visual C# 2012 Programming

Chapter 25

Windows Communication Foundation

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• What is WCF?
• WCF concepts
• WCF programming

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

You can find the wrox.com code downloads for this chapter at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9781118314418 on the Download Code tab. The code is in the Chapter 25 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

In recent years, as use of the Internet has become more ubiquitous, there has been a rapid increase in web services. A web service is like a website that is used by a computer instead of a person. For example, instead of browsing to a website about your favorite TV program, you might instead use a desktop application that pulled in the same information via a web service. The advantage here is that the same web service might be used by all sorts of applications, and, indeed, by websites. Also, you can write your own application or website that uses third-party web services. Perhaps you might combine information about your favorite TV program with a mapping service to show filming locations.

The .NET Framework has supported web services for some time now. However, in the more recent versions of the framework, web services have been combined with another technology, called remoting, to create Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), which is a generic infrastructure for communication between applications.

Remoting makes it possible to create instances of objects in one process and use ...