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Programming WCF Services
book

Programming WCF Services

by Juval Lowy
February 2007
Intermediate to advanced
634 pages
16h 1m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Programming WCF Services

Contracts

In WCF, all services expose contracts. The contract is a platform-neutral and standard way of describing what the service does. WCF defines four types of contracts.

Service contracts

Describe which operations the client can perform on the service. Service contracts are the subject of the next chapter, but are used extensively in every chapter in this book.

Data contracts

Define which data types are passed to and from the service. WCF defines implicit contracts for built-in types such as int and string, but you can easily define explicit opt-in data contracts for custom types. Chapter 3 is dedicated to defining and using data contracts, and subsequent chapters make use of data contracts as required.

Fault contracts

Define which errors are raised by the service, and how the service handles and propagates errors to its clients. Chapter 6 is dedicated to defining and using fault contracts.

Message contracts

Allow the service to interact directly with messages. Message contracts can be typed or untyped, and are useful in interoperability cases and when there is an existing message format you have to comply with. As a WCF developer, you should use message contracts only rarely, so this book makes no use of message contracts.

The Service Contract

The ServiceContractAttribute is defined as:

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Interface|AttributeTargets.Class, Inherited = false)] public sealed class ServiceContractAttribute : Attribute { public string Name {get;set;} public string ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596526997Errata Page