Programming WCF Services, 2nd Edition

Bindings

There are multiple aspects of communication with any given service, and there are many possible communication patterns: messages can follow a synchronous request-reply or asynchronous fire-and-forget pattern, messages can be bidirectional, messages can be delivered immediately or queued, and the queues can be durable or volatile. As discussed previously, there are many possible transport protocols for the messages, such as HTTP (or HTTPS), TCP, IPC, and MSMQ. There are also a few possible message encoding options: you can choose plain text to enable interoperability, binary encoding to optimize performance, or the Message Transport Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) for large payloads. Finally, there are multiple options for securing messages: you can choose not to secure them at all, to provide transport-level security only, or to provide message-level privacy and security, and of course there are numerous ways to authenticate and authorize the clients. Message delivery might be unreliable or reliable end-to-end across intermediaries and dropped connections, and the messages might be processed in the order they were sent or in the order they were received. Your service might need to interoperate with other services or clients that are aware of only the basic web service protocol, or with clients and services capable of using the score of WS-* modern protocols, such as WS-Security and WS-Atomic Transactions. Your service may need to be able to interoperate with any client, or ...