Skip to Content
Learning WCF
book

Learning WCF

by Michele Leroux Bustamante
May 2007
Intermediate to advanced
610 pages
20h 14m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning WCF

Chapter 2. Contracts

In Chapter 1, you were introduced to fundamental WCF concepts, including how to create and consume a service, how to host a service and expose endpoints where it can be reached by clients, how to support metadata exchange so that clients can generate service contracts, and how to work with client proxies to invoke service operations. In Chapter 1, you also learned the importance of service metadata, which is shared with clients through a WSDL document. Service metadata includes all of the necessary information for a client to invoke service operations, including:

  • The address where messages should be sent

  • The protocols supported by the service, including transport protocol, message encoding format, and other messaging protocols

  • A list of service operations and the required information to be passed to or returned from those operations

The service contract is the hub of this metadata—defining a set of operations, parameters, and return values. Each service contract represents a group of logically related operations that are exposed through endpoints. Endpoints describe the address where messages can be sent to reach those operations and the other required protocols to process those messages. Services may implement one or more service contracts, and thus may have different logical groupings of operations, but all of this is still ultimately included in the WSDL document.

As discussed in Chapter 1, clients communicate with services by exchanging messages that are serialized ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation

Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation

Chris Peiris, Dennis Mulder, Shawn Cicoria, Amit Bahree, Nishith Pathak
Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4

Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4

Pablo Cibraro, Kurt Claeys, Fabio Cozzolino, Johann Grabner
How to Cheat at IIS 7 Server Administration

How to Cheat at IIS 7 Server Administration

Chris Adams, Brian Frederick, Pattrick Santry

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596101626Errata Page