Chapter 8. Custom Transports

In This Chapter

• The Windows Communication Foundation Channel Layer

• Adding Support for Additional Transport Protocols

The Windows Communication Foundation is highly extensible. A particularly important way in which it can be extended is by adding support for transport protocols that are not among the several it already accommodates. A transport protocol is any protocol that provides for the requirements of the Open Systems Interconnection reference model's Transport layer and all the layers below that one. Extensions to the Windows Communication Foundation to support additional transport protocols are all but invisible to developers using the Windows Communication Foundation to construct applications. They can continue to use the familiar Windows Communication Foundation programming model, yet have their applications communicate via the newly supported transport protocols. This chapter shows how to extend the Windows Communication Foundation by adding support for sending messages via Internet mail protocols.