Programming WCF Services, 3rd Edition

What Is WCF?

WCF is a software development kit for developing and deploying services on Windows. I will describe what a service is in the next section. But WCF is much more—it is literally a better .NET. WCF provides a runtime environment for your services, enabling you to expose Common Language Runtime (CLR) types as services and to consume other services as CLR types. Although in theory you could build services without WCF, in practice, building services is significantly easier with WCF. WCF is Microsoft’s implementation of a set of industry standards defining service interactions, type conversions, marshaling, and the management of various protocols. Consequently, WCF provides interoperability between services.

WCF provides developers with the essential off-the-shelf plumbing required by almost all applications and, as such, it greatly increases productivity. The first release of WCF (as part of .NET 3.0) provided many useful facilities for developing services, such as hosting, service instance management, asynchronous calls, reliability, transaction management, disconnected queued calls, and security. The second release of WCF (as part of .NET 3.5) provided additional tools and extended the original offering with additional communication options. The third release (as part of .NET 4.0) includes configuration changes, a few extensions, and the new features of discovery (discussed in Appendix C) and routers (not discussed in this book). While not directly related to .NET 4.0, WCF ...