Learning WCF

Chapter 3. Bindings

So far in this book, you have learned how to create and consume services; how to design and implement service contracts; how to host services and configure service endpoints; and learned various ways to generate proxies for clients to invoke service operations. In the process, you have worked with a few of the standard bindings such as NetTcpBinding and BasicHttpBinding to establish communication channels between clients and services. Although I’ve shown you how to select a binding for a service endpoint, and I’ve discussed how bindings determine the protocols used to communicate, I haven’t begun to show you scope of what bindings can do. In this chapter, I’ll focus on bindings, explaining how to choose from the different standard bindings, how to customize them to meet your deployment needs, and how to create custom bindings to address special situations where the standard bindings don’t satisfy your requirements. In the process, you’ll learn how to work with web service bindings and connection-oriented bindings, how to implement two-way communication scenarios, and how to handle large messages.