Quick reference guide to WCF

Monday, August 17, 2009

What is WCF?
• WCF stands for Windows Communication Foundation.
• WCF delivers Microsoft’s first platform built specifically for advanced service-oriented architecture (SOA), with a framework intended to bring it within reach of most developers.
It provides a unified programming model and communications infrastructure for developing connected systems.
• WCF simplifies development process through a service-oriented programming model in which autonomous programs are composed using asynchronous message passing.
WCF Fundamentals
A WCF Service is a program that exposes a collection of Endpoints.
Each Endpoint is a portal for communicating with the world.
A Client is a program that exchanges messages with one or more Endpoints.
A client may also expose an Endpoint to receive Messages from a Service in a duplex message exchange pattern.
Endpoints components
A WCF Service Endpoint has an Address, a Binding, and a Contract.
The Endpoint's Address is a network address where the Endpoint resides.
The EndpointAddress class represents a WCF Endpoint Address.The Endpoint's Binding specifies how the Endpoint communicates with the world including things like transport protocol (e.g., TCP, HTTP), encoding (e.g., text, binary), and security requirements (e.g., SSL, SOAP message security).
The Binding class represents a WCF Binding.
The Endpoint's Contract specifies what the Endpoint communicates and is essentially a collection of messages organized in operations that have basic Message Exchange Patterns (MEPs) such as one-way, duplex, and request/reply.
The ContractDescription class represents a WCF Contract.WCF RuntimeThe WCF Runtime is the set of objects responsible for sending and receiving messages. MessageThe WCF Message is the unit of data exchange between a Client and an Endpoint.