WCF

Windows Communication Foundation

-Abhishek Tyagi

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 What is WCF?
• WCF is way of communicating across components,
applications and systems.

• It is designed keeping service orientation in mind.

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 So what is a service?
• Service is a piece of code, we interact with a
message.
• They are passive in itself. They wait for client
to initiate them by sending them a message.
• Services expose one or more end points
where message can be sent.
• An end point is the access point to the
functionality of the service.

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 Why WCF?
• WCF unifies the capabilities in ASMX, WSE,
Remoting, COM+, and MSMQ.
• Therefore the developers has to learn only one
programming model to build very effective and
industry standard services.
• Write service once and expose it many end points.
• A lot more options like reliable sessions, lot more
security options built in.

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 ABC of WCF
• An end point to a service
consists of three basic
information:
• Address: Address of the end
point. Where the end point can
be found.
• Binding: How a client can
communicate with the service.
• Contract: What operations are
available.

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 Contracts in WCF
• There are four types of contracts in WCF:
• Service Contract: Describe which operations the client can
perform on the service.
• Data Contract: Define which data types are passed to and
from the service.
• Fault Contract: Define which errors are raised by the service,
and how the service handles and propagates errors to its
clients.
• Message Contract: Allow the service to interact directly with
messages.

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 Creating a WCF Service
• To create a WCF web service. We need the following:
• An Interface containing service contracts.[IHello]
• A class implementing this interface.[HelloService]
• An SVC file containing assembly name and the
service name.[Hello.svc]
• And a configuration file to configure this service so
that it can communicate with client. [web.config ]

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Testing a basic locally hosted WCF Service

• Right click on SVC file, select view in browser. The

path in the address bar is where is service is hosted.
Copy this path.
• Open the VS’s command prompt type the following:
testwcfclient <path of wcf service>
In test window the methods in service will appear,
click on invoke and test them.

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 Consume a WCF Service
• Host the WCF service either on IIS or locally.
• Add Service reference in the client project. In
service URL give the path where service is
hosted.
• Create an object of this reference and use the
methods the usual way.

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 DEMO

A demo project is added with this

presentation.

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 References
• Codeproject.com
• Msdn.com
• Dotnetslackers.com
• Stackoverflow.com
• SAMS Microsoft WCF

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