Chapter 3: Building Web Services with WCF
In This Chapter
Becoming acquainted with WCF
Building a WCF service
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 (even non-Windows 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 ...
