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Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Development and the .NET Compact Framework

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is part of the .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5 and is a mixed network programming model that enables cross-application and cross-platform communication. With WCF, programmers / developers can more easily and quickly build SOA (Service-oriented architecture) applications. WCF allows programmers / developers to implement all or any of the existing standards (WS-*). Alternatively, in-house applications could be developed using high-performance binary communication.

Historically, various technologies such as ASMX Web services and .NET Remoting have been available to allow for communication between different applications. Microsoft's WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) makes development of distributed SOA (Service-oriented architecture) applications more intuitive, easy and allows the developer / programmer to implement all of these technologies with a single development framework. WCF makes incorporation of distributed transactions and message queues easier.

WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) allows for .NET Framework class libraries, tools and hosting services to enable software entities to converse using any protocols, including those used by Web services. Migrating ASP.NET Web Services to WCF allows applications to take benefit of new features and improvements that are exclusive to WCF. WCF is also extensible via custom behaviors (which influence how the WCF runtime works) and custom channels (which control how WCF services communicate with the outside world.) WCF has a bit of a learning curve compared to ASMX, but the benefits ABSOLUTLY out weight this learning curve.

Dotnet WCF has many important advantages relative to ASP.NET Web services. While ASP.NET tools are only for building Web services, WCF ((Windows Communication Foundation) gives tools that can be used when software entities must be built to communicate with one another. This will cut down the number of technologies that developers / programmers are expected to know in order to fit different software communication settings, its very cost effective for any software development resources.

WCF is a communication stack that allows services to be exposed over HTTP (like ASMX) and TCP (like Remoting) as well as Named Pipes (which is really an intra-machine cross process call), MSMQ and with .NET 3.5 REST. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) allows this because it's decoupled the communication parts of the service away from the business logic. All we need to do is decorate service classes, methods and DTO's with the appropriate contract attribute ([ServiceContract], [OperationContract] and [DataContract] respectively.). This had the benefit of being able to write a service once, and allowing many different kinds of clients to consume the same service (i.e. Java clients can use HTTP, .NET clients can use TCP, legacy can use MSMQ, etc.).

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