Windows Communication Foundation

DotNet3.0.svg

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. It is a part of the .NET Framework and provides a unified programming model for rapidly building service-oriented applications that communicate across the web and the enterprise.

Overview

WCF is designed to offer a manageable approach to creating web services and web service clients. It enables developers to build secure, reliable, and transacted services that can be composed into service-oriented applications. WCF unifies several existing distributed systems technologies, including ASP.NET Web Services, .NET Remoting, Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), and Enterprise Services.

Key Features

• Service Orientation: WCF supports the creation of service-oriented applications, which are designed to be loosely coupled and interoperable.
• Interoperability: WCF services can communicate with other services built on different platforms using standard protocols such as SOAP and HTTP.
• Security: WCF provides a comprehensive security model that includes authentication, authorization, confidentiality, and integrity.
• Reliability: WCF supports reliable messaging, ensuring that messages are delivered in the correct order and without duplication.
• Transactions: WCF supports distributed transactions, allowing multiple operations to be coordinated across different services.

Architecture

WCF is built on a layered architecture that includes the following components:

• Contracts: Define the service and data contracts that describe the operations and data types exposed by the service.
• Bindings: Specify how the service communicates with clients, including the transport protocol, encoding, and security requirements.
• Endpoints: Define the address where the service can be accessed, the binding to use, and the contract it implements.
• Behaviors: Customize the runtime behavior of the service, such as instance management, concurrency, and error handling.

Hosting

WCF services can be hosted in various environments, including:

• Internet Information Services (IIS)
• Windows Process Activation Service (WAS)
• Self-hosting in a console application, Windows service, or Windows Forms application

Development Tools

WCF services can be developed using Microsoft Visual Studio, which provides tools for creating, configuring, and testing WCF services. The Service Model Metadata Utility Tool (Svcutil.exe) can be used to generate service contracts and client proxies from WSDL documents.

Related Technologies

• ASP.NET Core
• gRPC
• Web API
• SOAP
• REST

See Also

• .NET Framework
• Service-oriented architecture
• Web service
• Microsoft Message Queuing
• Enterprise Services