Visual Studio® 2010 and .NET 4, Six-in-one

Chapter 13. Enhancements to the .NET Communication Framework

You learned about the details of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in Chapter 9, which provided an overview of what WCF is and how it can be leveraged. Given how new WCF is, major improvements and enhancements have been added, with major functionality added in both the .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 releases, all of which have occurred shortly after the initial WCF release with .NET 3.0.

This chapter focuses on the changes that have been introduced, and provides readers who have used older versions of WCF with some insight into new functionality that results from these new implementations.

ENHANCEMENTS IN WCF FRAMEWORK 3.5

The WCF Framework was first introduced in 2006 as part of .NET Framework 3.0. As part of the .NET 3.5 release, a lot of effort was put forth to make WCF the true "going-forward" technology for building out solutions created with a focus on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). So, key additions with .NET 3.5 included the following:

• Support for Ajax-enabled WCF services

• Improved support for WCS standards

• A new WCF designer

• New WCF Tools (WcfSvcHost and WcfTestClient)

• Support for REST-based WCF services

• Support for WCF and Windows Forms (WF) interactivity

These enhancements to WCF expanded the usability of WCF to include working with Ajax-enabled web applications, as well as providing diagnostic tools to help developers more quickly diagnose and resolve configuration and setup issues with their WCF services.

One great addition ...