Chapter 40: Windows Communication Foundation

Highlights

In the last four chapters, you learned several different ways of using services across the network: Web services using ASP.NET, .NET Remoting, Message Queuing, and Enterprise Services with DCOM as the native communication protocol. Every technology has its advantages and disadvantages. Writing Web services using ASP.NET, the services can be used from different platforms, while .NET Remoting and DCOM are bound to the Microsoft platform. Comparing performance with these communication technologies, DCOM often is the fastest, followed by .NET Remoting and ASP.NET. The extension mechanisms are very different in that ASP.NET Web services can be extended by using SOAP headers, whereas .NET Remoting uses sinks. Extending DCOM is not supported. You get some overlapping features, but using them in tandem is often the best choice. For example, with many applications Web services are used as a front end to serviced components. All these technologies have different programming models, which requires many skills from the developer.

.NET Framework 3.0 offers a new communication technology that includes all the features from the predecessors and combines it into one programming model.

In particular, this chapter discusses the following topics:

• A simple service and client

• Contracts

• Service implementation

• Binding

• Hosting

• Clients

• Duplex communication

Tip 

Using Visual Studio 2005 with WCF, you must have the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET 3.0 installed.