C# 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Building Web Services with WCF

In This Chapter

• Getting acquainted with WCF

• Creating WCF services

• Configuring a new service

• Deploying a new service

Windows Communication Foundation is just that — the foundation for communication between Windows computers. It just so happens that thanks to open standards like SOAP and ReST, WCF can communicate with other software systems.

Although ASMX was really designed to make public services — such as, for instance, adding an API to a simple Web application — WCF is a complete distributed computing platform for Windows.

In the early days of .NET, there was a technology called .NET Remoting that replaced DCOM. DCOM was Distributed COM, or the common accepted way to communicate between distributed components. It was replaced by REmoting when .NET came out. Remoting basically took the principles of DCOM and migrated them to .NET.

WCF isn't like that. WCF is a complete rethinking of distributed computing, based on the understanding that computing is becoming more and more distributed. New protocols for communication come out every day.

The goal here then is to define the differences between ASMX and WCF, and see that WCF is a true communications protocol and that ASMX is solely for adding services to Web sites. You can use either technology for both tasks, but one is certainly more suited than the other for each.

In this chapter I look at why WCF works well and then build the SHARP service for a variety of service types. Won't have to change a lick ...