Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 Cookbook for Developing SOA Applications

Using a WCF Service in Microsoft Office

One interesting and useful interoperate scenario of WCF service development is how to consume a WCF service from a Microsoft Office client such as Word, Excel, or Outlook. Currently, there are several possible solutions for WCF service consumption in an Office client, which include:

• Creating a .NET client proxy and exposing it as a COM object
• Using the XML HTTP component to consume the WCF service over plain HTTP in VBA code
• Directly using VSTO and .NET-managed code to consume WCF services

In this recipe, we will demonstrate a different approach for consuming a simple WCF service in a Microsoft Office client, which utilizes the WCF service moniker component.

How to do it...

The sample service here will use Office ...