Windows Communication Foundation
Saturday, December 06, 2008 13:28:06
This week I attended a 3-day training class from Interface Technical Training on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It was an excellent training class, led by Dan Wahlin, following Microsoft's official training modules, starting from the beginning, and including all major aspects of the technology, including basic setup, configuration, usage, debugging, security, transactions, and more.
If you're unfamiliar with WCF, it's a .NET technology that is designed to basically replace .NET remoting and web services. It uses a consistent API to build and consume services that can be exposed through TCP or HTTP, over an intranet, an extranet, or the public internet, or even over the same machine using named pipes. The services are defined in the code one time, and can be exposed using these different techniques simply by modifying the endpoints in the application configuration file. The services can easily be hosted in IIS or with a Windows service, and can be consumed very easily by using Visual Studio 2008, or with a little extra work using .NET command line commands.
The technology is very interesting, and looks like it will soon be the Microsoft standard for communication. Included out-of-the-box are features like encryption, detailed logging, and Reliable Messaging. WCF can also be backward-compatible with standard web services, with a simple configuration setting - of course, some of the more advanced features like decryption are unavailable using this technique, but it's a major part of what makes WCF such an exciting technology.
Tags: programming tech
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