Windows Communication Foundation

If you are familiar with web services, this should be easy. But let us start with the basics.

We know about object oriented programming concept. In object oriented programming concept, we create an instance of a component in form of an object and work with it. As we see, objects are tightly coupled to the component and hence controls the component's lifetime.

In contrary, service oriented applications are loosely coupled. In service oriented architecture, there exists a host (call it a server) that hosts a service and there exist clients to consume the service. The host publishes a contract, which is a template that defines methods and objects that can be called/used by clients. All communications between the host and clients take place in form of messages. SOAP is one of the protocols that defines the format of the message, and it uses XML.

Service oriented architecture is mostly implemented in distributed applications. In .NET, distributed architecture can be implemented using one of the four options: web services, .NET remoting, message queuing or COM+ services. Windows Communication Foundation is a framework that allows you to use all these features at one place and most importantly, it allows you to use these features interchangeably. For example, if you have implemented .NET remoting (that uses TCP as protocol since it is in LAN environment) and want to launch it as a web service (which is accessed using HTTP protocol), all you need to do is just alter the configuration. No rework required. That is why it is often referred to as Unified Programming Model.

When we talk of WCF, we should be familiar with basic terminologies like services, service hosts, communication protocols, messaging, end points etc. I will put a few of them in short here, and leave the rest to you and google.

A host that launches a service exposes one or more endpoints for the service. Think of an endpoint as a hook. To consume a service, a client should have hook to the endpoint of the service and then it can use the service. Similarly, to be able to receive a response from the server, the client should expose an endpoint that the host will hook to. In simple terms, two endpoints always exists when a client and a host are communicating. That makes a service as a collection of endpoints. A client has to connect to the correct endpoint to consume the service it wants to.

HTTP and TCP, as discussed above, are just two examples of communication protocols. And we already know what a contract and a message is. Remember, message is an XML string here. It should have already struck you that the objects and methods are serialized into XML and passed as a message, and de-serialization occurs to get them back in form. Sounds logical?

You will find more terms on WCF and short description here.

This tutorial will tell you how to go about creating a service using WCF. It is very simple to follow. At some points, it is bit confusing since the text formatting is not done properly...but you can easily figure it out.

I will talk about WCF more in posts to come.