This tutorial gives insight into what is WCF.
Introduction
This is an introductory tutorial to give some insight on WCF services. This will explain the basics of WCF and will work on adding more and more info to this.
What is a Service?
Let us start defining the Service. A service is:
ü Can be a facility supplying some public demand on need basis
ü Can be a Component capable of performing a task
ü Can be a vehicle by which a consumer's need or want is satisfied according to a negotiated contract (implied or explicit) which includes Service Agreement, Function Offered and so on
ü In terms of technical people, a Loosely coupled, autonomous, reusable, and have well-defined, platform-independent interfaces
Fig #1. Service
Looking at the diagram, a request to perform a task or an operation comes somewhere from the AIR (web world). The request message is passed to the Service Logic which processes the request data by using its data repository (if required) and then sends a response message.
Why do we need a Service?
By now, you might have understood the answer for this question. If you would like to provide your services to various applications around the world, you would develop a service and ask every application to consume this instead of supplying your piece of code to each application development team.
ü Easy to maintain
ü Easy to upgrade the Service Logic
What is a WCF Service?
Here comes the big word, WCF. WCF stands for Windows Communication Foundation. Windows Communication Foundation is a platform launched in .NET 3.0 on which various service based applications can be developed.
Any service developed on WCF platform can be referred as a WCF Service. The comparison with other services available in .NET framework is presented in the below table.
<!--[if !supportLists]-->Fig #2. Comparison Metrics
If you observe the table closely, services developed using WCF can communicate with different protocols like HTTP, TCP, Distributed Transactions (transactions applied across different machines), Queued Messaging (MSMQ) etc. A WCF Service provides wide variety of communication channels to consume its services.
A Service has two parts, one is Service Logic and the other is the Endpoint through which the external world can communicate to use the Service Logic.
Every WCF Service has an Endpoint through which the outside world can communicate with the service.
Endpoint provides information like Address of the service, communication channel of the service, what operations the service can perform. An Endpoint tells the outside world “Where” to communicate with the Service by providing the “Address” of the Service, “How” to communicate with the service by providing the “Binding” information of the service, “What” to communication with the service by providing the operations and data related information of the service.
Conclusion
From this article, we came to know what is a service, why we need a service and what is WCF Service, what is an end point. We will provide you more advanced topics on this very soon.