Professional WCF Programming: .NET Development with the Windows® Communication Foundation

Chapter 5. Understanding and Programming WCF Bindings

The preceding chapter discussed addresses and how they are used in specifying the location of a service. As mentioned previously, an address is one of the three main components that make up an endpoint. This chapter discusses the second component of those three, bindings.

Like addresses, bindings are one of the three critical components of an endpoint. Bindings specify how the endpoint will communicate; specifically, they dictate how a client needs to connect to an endpoint. Each service endpoint in WCF requires that a binding be well-specified, meaning that a binding must specify all the necessary information for a client to properly connect to and communicate with an endpoint, such as the transport, protocol, and encodings.

This chapter discusses bindings and all the information associated with bindings such as their properties and how to apply a binding to an endpoint. This chapter covers the following:

• An understanding of WCF bindings

• The WCF predefined bindings

• Binding properties

• Programming bindings

Understanding WCF Bindings

Bindings are the mechanism by which communication details are specified to make connecting to a service's WCF endpoint possible. WCF bindings can vary in levels of complexity. These levels can be anywhere on the spectrum of very simple to extremely complex. When defining a binding, the information you specify will typically fall into one of several categories:

• Protocol: Defines information to be used in the ...