Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation

Sending Messages Between Loosely Coupled Systems

To achieve service orientation, you need the ability to send messages from one service to another. In the context of WCF, service invocation is a general mechanism for sending messages between an entity that requests a service and another entity that provides the service. It is important to understand that it does not matter where the provider and consumer physically exist; they could be on the same physical machine or spread across the opposite ends of the planet. However, from a service execution perspective, it matters, and WCF fills this infrastructure gap.

Service invocation, irrespective of platform and technology, follows a similar pattern. At a high level, the steps involved when a consumer ...