Step Toward Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

Introduction:

In this series we will learn about the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF); the new technology to develop distributed applications.

Background:

The older way to Develop Distributed Applications is .Net Remoting and Web Services. WCF is more advanced than .Net remoting and Web Services. Take a step-by-step look at WCF.

Distributed Programming:

All you know that Distributed Programming is communication between multiple server applications or services in the network which provide some common features.
It must be capable of running behind the firewall.

Can share a common protocol (SOAP,WSDL) on different platforms.

History Of Programming:

Object Oriented Programming 1980:

• Polymorphism
• Encapsulation
• Sub-Classing

Component Oriented Programming 1990:

• Interface Based
• Dynamic Loading

Service Oriented Programming 2000:

• Message Based.
• Schema and Contract.

Now we know something about History in programming. Now further we will move toward the Services. Here we will discuss about services how we came to this Service oriented programming as we have seen that above. Let's move to services.

What Is a Service?

A Service is the self contained business function that exposes functionality contained within it. As well as which is not just XML or HTTP.

In service oriented application we move to Client-Server model to Sender-Receiver model it's the service as well no issues of versioning. In old days we was exposing our service with Web-Services. Following diagram will show that previously how we was exposing our service.



Windows Communication Foundation:

As above we have seen that in which way we was exposing our service to Http Client only not on other protocols. In WCF we are exposing our service like below.



In WCF our .Net function is available to various user now but with web services it's available only to HTTP client but In WCF it can accessed by TCP, ICP, MSMQ etc… clients also.

Conclusion:

In this article we have seen only introduction to Windows Communication Foundation(WCF). In forthcoming article we will see how to do Distributed Programming from Basic to advanced with WCF.