Summary

WCF provides functional capabilities that are a quantum leap forward for distributed application developers. WCF allows us to design, build, debug, and maintain distributed systems much more quickly than before, and with more features than were possible before. WCF fully embraces SOAP and WS-*, but it is also able to send POX messages and can fit within REST architectures. It consolidates the disparate technology stacks of RPC, COM+, Remoting, ASMX, WSE, and MSMQ. WCF is also highly extensible. This extensibility serves two purposes: First, it gives the WCF team the ability to change the product more easily over time. Second, it provides companies with the flexibility they need to adapt WCF to the requirements of their applications. As a result of this flexibility, the WCF API is fairly complex but powerful. Because describing all the different ways that WCF can be used would be virtually impossible, this book focuses on the WCF internals. In my view, this approach helps both the application developer and the framework developer leverage WCF for their distributed computing tasks.