Overview

WCF combines the functionality from ASP.NET Web services, .NET Remoting, Message Queuing, and Enterprise Services. What you get from WCF is:

• Hosting for components and services - Just as you can use custom hosts with .NET Remoting and WSE, you can host a WCF service in the ASP.NET runtime, a Windows service, a COM+ process, or just a Windows Forms application for peer-to-peer computing.

• Declarative behavior - Instead of the requirement to derive from a base class (this requirement exists with .NET Remoting and Enterprise Services), attributes can be used to define the services. This is similar to Web services developed with ASP.NET.

• Communication channels - Although to .NET Remoting is very flexible with changing the communication channel, WCF is a good alternative because it offers the same flexibility. WCF offers multiple channels to communicate using HTTP, TCP, or an IPC channel.

• Security infrastructure - For implementing platform-independent Web services, a standardized security environment must be used. The proposed standards are implemented with WSE 3.0, and this continues with WCF.

• Extensibility - .NET Remoting has a rich extensibility story. It is not only possible to create custom channels, formatters, and proxies but also to inject functionality inside the message flow on the client and on the server. WCF offers similar extensibilities; however, here the extensions are created by using SOAP headers.

• Support of previous technologies - Instead of rewriting a distributed solution completely to make use of WCF, WCF can be integrated with existing technology. A channel offered by WCF is communicating with a serviced components using DCOM. Web services developed with ASP.NET can be integrated.