Professional Visual Basic 2012 and .NET 4.5 Programming

Chapter 11

Services (XML/WCF)

What's in this chapter?

Introduction to Web services and remoting

Overview of service-oriented architecture

WSDL, SOAP and WS-* protocols

Creating a WCF service

Creating a WCF TCP host

Creating a WCF client

Testing a WCF service with Visual Studio over HTTP

Creating a WCF client with a data contract

Testing a WCF service over TCP

Wrox.com Code Downloads for this Chapter

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9781118314456 on the Download Code tab. The code is in the chapter 11 download and individually named according to the code filenames throughout the chapter.

Over the years there has been an ongoing effort to make communication between distributed components as easy as communication between components and objects within a single executable.

WCF is a framework for building services. Originally introduced as part of the .NET 3.5 enhancements, WCF combines support for several different protocols. Microsoft wanted to provide its developers with a framework that would offer the fastest means to getting a service solution in place, while remaining somewhat agnostic of the underlying transport protocol. Using the WCF, you can take advantage of a variety of powerful protocols under the covers—everything from binary to basic XML Web Services can be supported with the same implementation. WCF is the successor to a series of different distributed communication technologies.