WCF Services
When you want to develop a service oriented application, then for this purpose you will have to make use of one of the most popular framework Windows Communication Foundation abbreviated as WCF. With the use of WCF Services, you can send synchronous as well as asynchronous message from one service endpoint to any client that capable to consume these services. On an addition, if you want then you can also keep it is a serviced hosted in an application.
Goals of WCF
Mainly there are two goals that are followed by WCF web services in order to become the best build application.
- The first goal of WCF is to unify the programming model irrespective of the transport layer. The chief vision that they carried is that, whatever be the security model or transport mechanism used but the inner codes should be the same.
- The second goal of WCF is to implement the WS-* as early as possible so that it provides the best interoperability with the other WS-* implementations.
In what circumstance should you choose WCF
There are various situations when it becomes necessary to select the WCF services. Some of those circumstances are mentioned below.
- When you want to develop a secure service in order to process business transactions.
- If you want to develop a chat service which enables two people to communicate effectively.
- WCF web services become utmost necessary when you want to polls one or more services for data and simultaneously that data is used for the logical presentation.
WCF had been on the market since .NET3 and now it is the one among the mature solution. Previously the developers had to write a different code based on the service that they used. This service includes Remoting, MSMQ, WSE, etc. The best part of the WCF is that it supports more complex security option, at the time when you need them. Make sure when you use the wsHttpBinding instead of the basicHttpBinding then you will need the WCF services more than the other. The reason behind it is that wsHttpBinding has the entire support for the WS-Security as per the W3C standard.
Generally, it has been noticed that you will have to make use of the WebAPI in most of the scenario. And the WCF will be used only for the certain situation where the WebAPI does facilitate you with the appropriate option. Only one thing that you must keep in your mind is that the only situation when you use WCF for the security purpose is that when it must be forced to use the unencrypted that is the HTTP as the transport protocol.
There are certain features of WCF application which have helped WCF to become a supreme one. The features are:
- Service Orientation
- Data Contracts
- Interoperability
- Reliable and Queued Messages
- AJAX and REST support
- Extensibility
- Multiple Transports and Encoding
- Durable Messages