Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a dedicated communication frame work provided by the Microsoft. WCF is a part of .NET 3.0. The runtime environment provided by the WCF enables us to expose our CLR types as services and to consume other existing services as CLR types.

Background:

In the world there are lot of distributed communication technologies exist. Some of them are:

• ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX)
• Web Services Enhancements (WSE)
• Messaging (MSMQ)
• .NET Enterprise Services (ES)
• .NET Remoting

Creating and Consuming a Sample WCF Service:

Three major steps are involved while creating and consuming the WCF services. Those are:

1. Create the Service.(Creating)
2. Binding an address to the service and host the Service. (Hosting)
3. Consuming the Service.(Consuming)

Step 1: Creating the Service

In WCF, all services are exposed as contracts. Contract is a neutral way of describing the service what it does. Mainly we have four types of contracts:

1. Service Contract
   
   This contract describes all the available operations that client can perform _disibledevent="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Here IFirstWCFService is the service contract interface, that is exposed.