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

Chapter 8. Services

This chapter focuses on those items that are specific to the service side of Windows Communication Foundation. The chapters up until now have been dealing with topics and concepts that apply to the service and the client, and a lot of that still applies to the service itself. Yet, there are some items that are service specific, and this chapter delves into those.

As a quick recap, Chapters 4 through 6 discussed addresses, bindings, and contacts; concepts that apply to both the service and the client. Chapter 7 focused on the client itself and discussed topics that addressed WCF from the perspective of the client such as consuming WCF services, channels, and communication patterns.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Overview of WCF service concepts

• Behaviors

• Error handling

Overview

When you write a book you spend a lot of time organizing and laying out the topics and content that you are going to write about. A good portion of that time is trying to figure out the best way to organize and lay out the topics that will provide a smooth flow of content and benefit the reader the most. Do you discuss bindings first, or addresses? Maybe discussing contracts first would make more sense. These are the types of questions that keep an author up at night (besides writing).

It is hard to understand, let alone build, Windows Communication Foundation services without first understanding addresses, bindings, and contracts because that is what defines a WCF service. That is why ...