Programming WCF Services

What Is WCF?

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is an SDK for developing and deploying services on Windows. WCF provides a runtime environment for your services, enabling you to expose CLR types as services, and to consume other services as CLR types

Services

A service is a unit of functionality exposed to the world. In that respect, it is the next evolutionary step in the long journey from functions to objects to components to services.

Addresses

In WCF, every service is associated with a unique address. The address provides two important elements: the location of the service and the transport protocol or transport schema used to communicate with the service.

Contracts

In WCF, all services expose contracts. The contract is a platform-neutral and standard way of describing what the service does. WCF defines four types of contracts. Service contracts Describe which operations the client can perform on the service.

Hosting

The WCF service class cannot exist in a void. Every WCF service must be hosted in a Windows process called the host process. A single host process can host multiple services, and the same service type can be hosted in multiple host processes.

Bindings

There are multiple aspects of communication with any given service, and there are many possible communication patterns: messages can be synchronous request/reply or asynchronous fire-and-forget; messages can be bidirectional; messages can be delivere.

Endpoints