What is WCF ?

What is WCF?

Answer :

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is an SDK for developing and deploying services on Windows. WCF provides a runtime environment for services, enabling you to expose CLR types as services, and to consume other services as CLR types.

WCF is part of .NET 3.0 and requires .NET 2.0, so it can only run on systems that support it.



WCF is Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications with managed code. It extends the .NET Framework to enable developers to build secure and reliable transacted Web services that integrate across platforms and interoperate with existing investments.




WCF ---Windows communication foundation is a feature in .NET 3.5 framework.

As we have the webservice in the earlier versions, we have in addition WCF in 3.5.

The main advantage with WCF is
1) you can create one service that can be binded with multiple protocols, like HTTP, TCP,SecureHTTP.

so if you want to connect with HTTP you can use the endpoint http, and so on.

Here we have the concept 'ABC'
that is Address, Binding and Contract.
Here we create more than one endpoint with different bindings.
And you can use one of the binding well suited for your application.
For windows you can TCP, and for web based you can use HTTP or secure HTTP.






Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. Using WCF, you can send data as asynchronous messages from one service endpoint to another. A service endpoint can be part of a continuously available service hosted by IIS, or it can be a service hosted in an application. An endpoint can be a client of a service that requests data from a service endpoint. The messages can be as simple as a single character or word sent as XML, or as complex as a stream of binary data. A few sample scenarios include:

* A secure service to process business transactions.

* A service that supplies current data to others, such as a traffic report or other monitoring service.

* A chat service that allows two people to communicate or exchange data in real time.

* A dashboard application that polls one or more services for data and presents it in a logical presentation.

* Exposing a workflow implemented using Windows Workflow Foundation as a WCF service.

* A Silverlight application to poll a service for the latest data feeds.

While creating such applications was possible prior to the existence of WCF, WCF makes the development of endpoints easier than ever. In summary, WCF is designed to offer a manageable approach to creating Web services and Web service clients.