Learning WCF

Web Service Bindings

Web services make it easy to expose system functionality to remote clients. For one, web services are typically exposed over HTTP or HTTPS through ports that administrators allow to be open. More importantly, web services provide an interoperable way to communicate using standards such as SOAP, WSDL, and XML, making them the ideal conduit for communication between trading partners, independent systems, and heterogeneous environments.

Several of the standard WCF bindings can be used to expose web services, including BasicHttpBinding, WSHttpBinding, WSDualHttpBinding, and WSFederationHttpBinding. BasicHttpBinding supports SOAP 1.1 by default, whereas the other three bindings default to SOAP 1.2 with support for WS-Addressing among other protocols.

This section will focus on the fundamental web service bindings, BasicHttpBindng and WSHttpBinding. The first thing you’ll do is complete a lab that exercises each binding. After the lab, I’ll explain the following concepts:

• Binding features and their applicability to these bindings

• Scenarios in which each binding is appropriate

• MessageVersion settings

• Serialization differences for SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2

• Alternatives for exposing a single service over two bindings

Lab: Exposing Web Services with BasicHttpBinding and WSHttpBinding

In this lab, you’ll exposed web service endpoints for a service that lets users upload photos and save a record of each upload to a database. You’ll provide endpoints for SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2 with WS-Addressing ...