Windows Communication Foundation

According to Microsoft's official explanation, WCF (formerly known as "Indigo") is hosted Code Create and run a service-oriented application Program . It enables developers to build a secure, trusted, and transactional solution across platforms, and to be compatible with existing systems. WCF is a set of developers for Microsoft Distributed Application Development. It integrates all technologies related to distributed systems on the. NET platform, such as. Net remoting, asmx, WSE, and MSMQ. In terms of the scope of communication (communiation), it can be cross-process, cross-machine, cross-subnet, enterprise network, or Internet; in terms of host programs, it can be ASP. net, EXE, WPF, Windows Forms, NT Service, COM + as the host (host ). The protocols supported by WCF include TCP, HTTP, cross-process, and custom. Security modes include SAML, Kerberos, X509, user/password, and custom. That is to say, it is easy to develop a SOA-based Distributed System under the WCF framework. Microsoft includes all the technical elements related to this, and has mastered the concept, it is equivalent to mastering the key to open the SOA door.
WCF is built on. NET Framework 2.0. The official version should be release as the core part of Windows Vista. However, this does not mean that WCF can only run under Windows Vista. If winfx runtime components is installed, it can still be used in Windows XP and Windows 2003 operating systems. Visual Studio 2005 does not contain WCF. However, after winfx runtime components is installed, you can develop and create a WCF program in Visual Studio 2005.
Currently the latest WCF version is February 2006 CTP, download page is: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx? Familyid = F51C4D96-9AEA-474F-86D3-172BFA3B828B & displaylang = en. Use wcf.exe to use a few related tools, such as svcutil.exe, so you also need to download the winfx runtime components SDK, its download page is: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx? Familyid = 9be1fc7f-0542-47f1-88dd-61e3ef88c402 & displaylang = en. You can select Network or local installation to install the SDK. For local installation, the file size is about 1 GB, which is an ISO file. After the SDK is installed, there is a Microsoft SDK directory under the Program Files directory.
WCF is Microsoft's key product, so it also launched a special official website (http://windowscommunication.net/), which has the latest WCF news release, it also introduces the technical documentation and sample code of WCF.

Ii. Benefits of WCF
In the article introducing windows Communication Foundation prepared by David Chappell, a fresh example is provided to illustrate the advantages of WCF. Suppose we want to develop a new application for a car rental company for Car Rental booking service. The taxi booking service will be accessed by a variety of applications, including call center, J2EE-based taxi booking service and partner application ),:
From a functional perspective, WCF can be regarded as a union of asmx,. Net remoting, Enterprise Service, WSE, MSMQ, and other technologies. (Note: This statement only applies to functions. In fact, WCF is far from simple union. It is a service-oriented product and has changed the normal development mode .) Therefore, for the above example of the Auto Booking Service System, the use of WCF can meet the needs of security, trustworthiness, interoperability, cross-platform communication, and so on. Developers no longer need to learn about. Net remoting, asmx, and other technologies separately.
In summary, WCF has the following advantages:
1. Uniformity
As described above, WCF is an integration of asmx,. Net remoting, Enterprise Service, WSE, MSMQ, and other technologies. Since WCF is fully written by the managed code, developing the WCF application and developing other. there is no big difference between. NET applications. We can still use WCF to create service-oriented applications like creating object-oriented applications. Http://wayfarer.cnblogs.com/images/cnblogs_com/wayfarer/wcf/wcf01.gif
Http://wayfarer.cnblogs.com/images/cnblogs_com/wayfarer/wcf/wcf03.gif
2. Interoperability
Since the most basic communication mechanism of WCF is soap, this ensures the interoperability between systems, even when different contexts are run. This communication can be Based on. NET to. net, as shown in:
Cross-process, cross-machine, or cross-platform communication is supported as long as standard web services, such as J2EE application servers (such as WebSphere and WebLogic) are supported ). Applications can run in Windows or other operating systems, such as Sun Solaris, hp unix, and Linux. As shown in:
3. Security and trustworthiness
WS-Security, WS-trust, and WS-secureconversation are added to soap messages for user authentication, data integrity verification, data privacy, and other security factors.
WS-reliablemessaging is added to the SOAP header to allow trusted end-to-end communication. The soap-based information exchange based on WS-coordination and WS-atomictransaction supports two-phase commit transactions ). Http://wayfarer.cnblogs.com/images/cnblogs_com/wayfarer/wcf/wcf04.gif
The preceding WS-policies are supported in WCF. For messaging, soap is the basic protocol of Web Service. It contains the header and body ). In the message header, WS-Addressing is defined to locate the address information of the SOAP message, and MTOM (message transmission optimization mechanism, message transmission optimization mechanism) is also included ). : Http://wayfarer.cnblogs.com/images/cnblogs_com/wayfarer/wcf/wcf05.gif
4. Compatibility
WCF fully considers compatibility with old systems. Installing WCF does not affect existing technologies such as asmx and. Net remoting. Even though both of them use soap, applications developed based on WCF can still directly interact with asmx.