Real World .NET 4, C#, and Silverlight®: Indispensible Experiences from 15 MVPs

9

Pragmatic Services Communication with WCF

by Christian Weyer

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) has been around for quite a few years. Its first incarnation showed up with .NET 3.0 in 2006. But still I meet a lot of people out there in the wilderness of software projects that do not know about it, let alone use and embrace it. Whenever you need to think about designing and implementing distributed applications in .NET, WCF is one of the major choices at hand — whether you have colleagues who hate it, or friends who love it.

This chapter presents some practical and pragmatic approaches and implementations to service-oriented communication based on WCF. This chapter goes beyond the prototypical introduction, and beyond common sense you can read in other books or publications. The facts and opinions presented here have been gathered in countless real-world client projects since the first beta versions of Indigo, as WCF was called once upon a time.

Keep in mind that this chapter is neither a beginner's introduction to WCF, nor a fully embracing, “everything WCF” reference — but rather something in between, actually.

You may read a few ideas and approaches in this chapter that surely go beyond common opinions and contradict statements in other publications about service orientation ...