Learning WCF

Exposing Multiple Service Endpoints

So far in this chapter, I have shown you different ways to create services, how to expose a service endpoint and metadata exchange endpoint, how to generate client proxies, how to work with metadata, and how to configure service behaviors. In this section, I’ll place the emphasis on endpoints, binding configuration, and allocation of assemblies for a more complex solution.

WCF includes a number of standard bindings that allow you to quickly configure a service for a particular set of protocols. Clients must use compatible protocols when they communicate with each endpoint. Services can expose multiple endpoints for the same service contract in order to expose functionality over different protocols. For example, a service may be called by internal clients over TCP, but by external clients over HTTP. In addition to supporting different protocols, internal and external clients may not have access to the same service contracts. Some operations may be allowed only by clients within the domain, while others are publicly available to remote clients on the Internet.

In this lab you will configure multiple endpoints for a service to support different endpoint and binding configurations. In the process you’ll explore the following concepts:

• Hosting multiple services

• Configuring multiple endpoints for a service

• Accessing a service from a Windows client application

• Initializing proxies from multiple endpoint and binding configurations

• Comparing proxy generation ...