Welcome to WCF tutorial. This tutorial will clarify about WCF concepts, developing new services and many more things in WCF. Each segment of this tutorial has sufficient number of code snippets to clarify various concepts of WCF.
What is WCF Service?
WCF stands for Windows Communication Foundation and is a great technology to learn and develop a distributed application.
This is one of the popular distributed system created by Microsoft for communication between applications.
Windows Communication Foundation (Code named Indigo) is a platform and runtime framework for building, arranging and deploying distributed services. Interoperability is the key highlight of WCF. It was introduced in .Net Framework 3.0. WCF is a consolidated highlights of Web Service, Remoting, MSMQ and COM+.
WCF is mainly used for developing the distributed system.
Advantages of using WCF
1. WCF is interoperability
2. WCF is popular because of its Scalability
3. Enhance security and reliability compare to ASMX (Web services)
Below are the topics which are important in WCF Services for beginners and for experience as well.
Here is the collection of a wide range of topics in WCF Services. This WCF tutorial includes Sample C# code snippet, Configuration Steps, Videos, and theory.
What is WCF used for?
WCF is used to transfer data as asynchronous messages from one endpoint to other service endpoint. A service endpoint is a continuously available service. A service endpoint is hosted by IIS, or can be a self hosted application.
WCF vs Web API
There are few differences between WCF services and Web API.
- WCF supports SOAP and XML format, while Web API supports any media format including JSON, XML.
- WCF is good for developing service oriented applications, while ASP.Net Web API is perfect for building HTTP services.
- It supports HTTP, TCP, Named Pipes as protocol on another side Web API supports HTTP protocol only.
- WCF needs lots of configuration to run, while Web API is simple and no configuration needed to run.
How can I learn WCF?
If you are from programming background, then learning WCF is not so difficult.
Step by Step WCF Tutorial for Beginners
This WCF tutorial is focused on beginners as well as intermediate level users.
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