Learning WCF

Summary

This chapter covered a lot of ground, beginning with a look at the purpose of WCF, the problems it solves and its alignment with SOA, through discussion of the fundamentals developers should know before they begin working with WCF. I also touched on the overall architecture of WCF, though this is covered in greater detail in Chapter 3. Through hands-on practice and discussion you should be comfortable now with the following concepts:

• Defining service contracts and services

• Hosting services in a console application or in IIS

• Exposing endpoints for a service using various standard bindings

• Working with Visual Studio templates and WCF tools to improve productivity

• Working with service metadata and configuring related service behaviors

• Generating proxies to invoke services

Of course, the next step is to start diving into the details of service contracts, bindings, and hosting. In addition, you’ll need to learn more about service behaviors and messaging protocols that handle instancing, throttling, reliability, security and exception handling.

Since service contracts are central to defining the messages exchanged between clients and services, the next chapter will focus on this subject. In Chapter 2, I’ll explain how to approach service contract design, how to work with complex types and how to control serialization on many levels. In the process of reading Chapter 2, you’ll further solidify your knowledge of the fundamental concepts touched on in this chapter.