WCF Online Training

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.

It is a framework for building, configuring, and deploying network-distributed services. Earlier known as Indigo, it enables hosting services in any type of operating system process. Every section of this WCF online training has adequate number of examples to explain different concepts of WCF. The objective of this WCF online training is to help those readers who want to learn the basics of WCF from scratch. After completing this WCF online training, the readers will acquire sufficient knowledge on WCF and advance to a higher level of expertise.

Before proceeding with this WCF online training, you should have a basic knowledge of the .NET framework. All the content and graphics published in this WCF online training are the property of WCF online training. The user of this WCF online training is prohibited to reuse, retain, copy, distribute or republish any contents or a part of contents in any manner without written consent of the publisher. We strive to update the contents of our WCF online training website and tutorials as timely and as precisely as possible.

WCF Course Overview

WCF is a .NET platform for developing services .Service is any functionality that can be consumed by the outside world. A WCF online training service defines well defined communication protocols to communicate with it. A service can be located anywhere; it could be on local machine on the intranet or even internet. A client consumes the functionality exposed by the service. A service can be anything it can be an independent application like asp.net or it can be another service. A WCF application consists of three components: 1.WCF service, 2.WCF service host, 3.WCF service client.WCF platform is also known as the Service Model. It allows you to concentrate more on what you want to implement rather than thinking on how to implement. It has a default security mechanism which is extremely robust. WCF online training provides no guarantee regarding the accuracy, timeliness or completeness of our website or its contents including this WCF online training. WCF stands for Windows Communication Foundation. The elementary feature of WCF is interoperability. It is one of the latest technologies of Microsoft that is used to build service-oriented applications.

WCF will contain helper APIs for pre-processing HTTP requests or responses, doing all the parsing and manipulation of arguments, encapsulating the HTTP information in objects that can be later transferred for further processing. This will relieve the user from dealing with HTTP internals directly if he wants to. This feature will also present a plug-in capability for media-type formatters of data formats like JSON, Atom, OData, etc. WCF online training will support some of them out of the box, but the user will be able to add his own formatters. The new WCF is already being built, Block demoing sample code using it, but he mentioned that the feature set and what WCF is going to look like is not set in stone. They will publish an initial version of the framework on CodePlex in the near future for the community to be able to test and react, shaping the future of WCF online training. More details are to come during PDC 2010. Message instances are sent as well as received for all types of communication between the client and the service.

WCF online courses define the address where a message is to be sent or received. It also specifies the communication mechanism to describe how the messages will be sent along with defining the set of messages. It defines the way an endpoint communicates. It comprises of some binding elements that make the infrastructure for communication. For example, binding states the protocols used for transport like TCP, HTTP, etc., the format of message encoding, and the protocols related to security as well as reliability. Hosting from the viewpoint of WCF refers to the WCF service hosting which can be done through many available options like self-hosting, IIS hosting, and WAS hosting. This is a significant concept of WCF, as it facilitates easy interaction between a client application and a WCF service. Normally, metadata for a WCF service is generated automatically when enabled, and this is done by inspection of service and its endpoints. A client application that gets created for exposing the service operations in the form of methods is known as a WCF client. This WCF online training can be hosted by any application, even the one that does service hosting.