TechEd - Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation
The 4th session I attended today was presented by Shy Cohen. Shy Cohen works on the communications team and as such has been involved in the development of what is now called Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Both are owned by his team. But back to this session, which was an introduction into WCF.
WCF combines and extends a number of communication stacks. Think of Enterprise Services, MSMQ, .Net remoting, ASMX webservices and WSE. The design goals for WCF were:
- Unify the distributed technology stacks. This they accomplished by, among others, supply a uniform API to the different stacks.
- Increase developer productivity. The API and configuration capabilities decrease the amount of code required by some 85% and dramatically decreases the time required to get to grips with this technology.
- Improve Integration. Which means better integration with applications on other platforms, as well as existing Microsoft technologies.
The ABC of WCF shows how WCF is split-up into separate layers. Not quite the right word, but you get the picture:
- A - Address. Where can we access the service. This could be a service hosted by IIS, but basically any process running on a system capable of running the CLR. So technically, a Winforms or even console application could host a WCF service.
- B - Binding. How can we communicate with the service.
- C - Contract. What does the service do and what does the interface look like. Basically, the WSDL definition.
So far the basics. Shy Cohen shows a lot of demo's which showed how easy it is to use WCF, and provided a lot more detail. In fact, there were so many details that is was nearly impossible to keep up with taking notes. So you'll have to take my word for it that it's all easy to use. And extremely powerful.
The samples used during this session will be available soon on Shy Cohen's personal website.