Learning WCF

Creating a New Service from Scratch

You’re about to be introduced to the WCF service. This lab isn’t your typical “Hello World”—it’s “Hello Indigo”! In this lab, you will learn how to build a new WCF service and in the process learn the minimum requirements of service development and consumption. Here’s a short list of things you’ll accomplish:

• Create a new service contract and service implementation

• Programmatically configure a service host, its endpoints, and bindings

• Create a client application and open a client channel proxy to invoke the service

Now, before you start thinking “been there, done that,” this simple lab will be slightly different because I’m going to give you some practical design tips that ensure configurability and appropriate decoupling of service, host, and client. In addition, I’ll be diving deeper into basic concepts such as services, service contracts, endpoints, bindings, ServiceHost, and channels.

Lab: Creating Clients and Services Programmatically

In this first lab, you will create a new solution with three projects: a service, a host, and a client. When you run the service host, you’ll expose a single service endpoint. The client application will access service operations through that endpoint. You’ll host the service in a console application and invoke the service using a manually constructed proxy. This lab will teach you the basic requirements for creating, hosting, and consuming a service with WCF.

Creating a new service

The first thing you will do is create ...