Chapter 43. Windows Communication Foundation
WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?
WCF overview
A simple service and client
Service, Operation, Data, and Message Contracts
Implementing a Service
Using Binding for Communication
Different Hosting Options for Services
Creating Clients with a Service Reference and Programmatically
Duplex communication
Previous to .NET 3.0, several communication technologies were required in a single enterprise solution. For platform-independent communication, ASP.NET Web services were used. For more advanced Web services — technologies such as reliability, platform-independent security, and atomic transactions — Web Services Enhancements added a complexity layer to ASP.NET Web services. If the communication needed to be faster, and both the client and service were .NET applications, .NET Remoting was the technology of choice. .NET Enterprise Services with its automatic transaction support, by default, used the DCOM protocol, which was even faster than .NET Remoting. DCOM was also the only protocol to allow the passing of transactions. All of these technologies have different programming models that require many skills from the developer.
.NET Framework 3.0 introduced a new communication technology that includes all the features from these predecessors and combines them into one programming model: Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
WCF OVERVIEW
WCF combines the functionality from ASP.NET Web services, .NET Remoting, Message Queuing, and Enterprise Services. What you get ...
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