U3's Couch

In the last few days, I was trying to simplify the definition of WCF And what are the benefits that the WCF will give it to us?

What Is WCF?

The WCF is the shortened Windows Communication Foundation which is a new communication subsystem to enable applications, in one machine or across multiple machines connected by a network, to communicate. WCF applications can be developed in any language which can target the .NET runtime.

This new technology (WCF) simplifies development of connected applications through a new service-oriented programming model, HOW? It enables the development of more secure, reliable, transacted services that interoperate with non-Microsoft platforms and integrate with existing investments where that is the key of SOA model

Where In Service Orientation you think different and describe things via services and divide your system into smaller parts which run as services. These services can communicate with others via messages. In each service you can apply Object Orientation to accomplish goals of that service.

Object Orientation!!! We are talking about SOA!!!

By the way Service Orientation is a complement to Object Orientation. It means you will not kick Object Orientation out to use Service Orientation. Service Orientation uses Object Orientation in its core, but there are some distributed scenarios that can be viewed by Object Orientation so you use Service Orientation to describe these scenarios.

Cool, we can do it using the ASP.net web services.

That's right but checks the following benefits and then you can decide

• Because WCF can communicate using Web services, interoperability with other platforms that also support SOAP, such as the leading J2EE-based application servers, is straightforward.
• You can also configure and extend WCF to communicate with Web services using messages not based on SOAP, for example, simple XML formats like RSS.
• Performance is of paramount concern for most businesses. WCF is developed with the goal of being one of the fastest distributed application platform developed by Microsoft.
• To allow optimal performance when both parties in a communication are built on WCF, the wire encoding used in this case is an optimized binary version of an XML Information Set. Messages still conform to the data structure of a SOAP message, but their encoding uses a binary representation of that data structure rather than the standard angle-brackets-and-text format of the XML 1.0 text encoding. Using this option makes sense for communicating with the call center client application, because it is also built on WCF, and performance is an important concern.
• Managing object lifetimes, defining distributed transactions, and other aspects of Enterprise Services are now provided by WCF. They are available to any WCF-based application, which means that the rental car reservation application can use them with any of the other applications it communicates with.
• Because it supports a large set of the WS-* specifications, WCF helps provide reliability, security, and transactions when communicating with any platform that also supports these specifications.
• The WCF option for queued messaging, built on Message Queuing, allows applications to use persistent queuing without using another set of application programming interfaces.

Finally we can say that WCF is flexible. For example, while WCF uses SOAP as an underlying structure, it is not bound to using SOAP for wire communication. In fact, WCF can be configured to process "plain" XML data that is not wrapped in a SOAP envelope. WCF can also be extended to support specific XML formats, such as ATOM (a popular RSS standard), and even non-XML formats, such as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). This flexibility ensures that code written today will be valid in the future, even if protocols change or are replaced. Therefore, WCF was designed for the present and the future.