Programming WCF Services

Addresses

In WCF, every service is associated with a unique address. The address provides two important elements: the location of the service and the transport protocol or transport schema used to communicate with the service. The location portion of the address indicates the name of the target machine, site, or network; a communication port, pipe, or queue; and an optional specific path or URI. A URI is a Universal Resource Identifier, and can be any unique string, such as the service name or a GUID.

WCF 1.0 supports the following transport schemas:

• HTTP

• TCP

• Peer network

• IPC (Inter-Process Communication over named pipes)

• MSMQ

Addresses always have the following format:

[base address]/[optional URI]

The base address is always in this format:

[transport]://[machine or domain][:optional port]

Here are a few sample addresses:

http://localhost:8001
http://localhost:8001/MyService
net.tcp://localhost:8002/MyService
net.pipe://localhost/MyPipe
net.msmq://localhost/private/MyService
net.msmq://localhost/MyService

The way to read an address such as

http://localhost:8001

is like this: “Using HTTP, go to the machine called localhost, where on port 8001 someone is waiting for my calls.”

If there is also a URI such as:

http://localhost:8001/MyService

then the address would read as follows: “Using HTTP, go to the machine called localhost, where on port 8001 someone called MyService is waiting for my calls.”

TCP Addresses

TCP addresses use net.tcp for the transport, and typically include a port number such ...