Steve Resnick has worked at Microsoft since the mid-1990s, spanning architect, developer, and evangelist roles in the field. He specializes in Internet technologies, architecting and designing high-volume, high-value Web applications. Steve is the National Technology Director for the Microsoft Technology Centers in the United States, where he sets strategy and direction so that his team can solve the toughest customer challenges. He has worked with .NET since the beginning and is an expert in Web services, BizTalk, transaction processing, and related technologies. He holds a M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Boston University and University of Delaware, respectively.
Rich Crane is a Technical Architect at the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham, Massachusetts. A software architect and engineer with more than 18 years of experience, Rich has spent the last six years helping customers architect and build solutions on the Microsoft platform. He has worked with numerous Microsoft products and technologies and is an expert in BizTalk, SQL Server, SharePoint, Compute Cluster Server, and of course Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. He has spoken at conferences and community events such as TechEd and Code Camp. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Drexel University with a B.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Chris Bowen is Microsoft’s Developer Evangelist for the northeastern United States, specializing in development tools, platforms, and architectural best practices. Asoftware architect and engineer with 15 years of experience, Chris joined Microsoft after holding senior positions at companies such as Monster.com, VistaPrint, Staples, and IDX Systems, and consulting on Web presence and e-commerce projects with others. He is coauthor of Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System (2006, WROX) and holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Management Information Systems, both from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Essential WCF Preface
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is the unified programming model for writing distributed applications on the Microsoft platform. It subsumes the prior technologies of ASMX, .NET Remoting, DCOM, and MSMQ and provides an extensible API to meet a wide variety of distributed computing requirements. Prior to WCF, you needed to master each of those technologies to select the right approach for a particular distributed application requirement. WCF simplifies this considerably by providing a unified approach.
XML Web Services is the most common technique for distributed computing in modern applications. They're used to expose technical and business functions on private or public networks. Sometimes they use the SOAP specification, sometimes they don't. They typically transmit information as text documents containing angle brackets, but not always. They generally use HTTP for the transport, but again, not always. WCF is a framework for working with XML Web Services and is compatible with most technology stacks.
Rich, Chris, and I have each developed code with .NET from the beginning (circa 1999). We work at Microsoft in the field, helping customers use WCF to solve real-world problems. Our customers range from large multinational corporations to ISVs to Web startups. Each has different challenges, needs, and priorities that we individually address. We show them what's possible, recommend what works well, and steer clear of what doesn't. We have experience building distributed applications and leverage that experience in teaching others about WCF.
Our goal for this book is to present WCF in a way that can immediately be put to use by software developers. We cover the material in enough detail that you know how and why to use different features. We go a bit further in most cases, describing some of the subtleties in the framework, but not so far as to document the API.
The Blogosphere is rich with WCF details. Much of it comes from the .NET product team and much of it comes from other developers learning it along the way. We made extensive use of Blogs as source material. This book brings order to that repository by organizing it in a way that can be easily consumed from your desk, sofa, or wherever you do your best reading.
Who Should Read This Book?
We wrote this book for software developers who want to build distributed applications on the .NET platform. As fellow developers, we know the importance of solid advice and clear examples on how to use new technology. We've trolled the Blogosphere, scoured internal Microsoft e-mail aliases, and wrote plenty of code to provide you with the best examples for doing the things you need to do.
Architects who need to understand WCF will also benefit from this book. The chapters covering basics, bindings, channels, behaviors, hosting, workflow, and security describe important aspects of designing and implementing services with WCF. Reading the two to three page introductions in each of these chapters may be the best way to get the 50,000-foot view of the technology.
Our goal in writing this book is to shorten your learning curve for WCF. We describe and demonstrate how to do the common tasks, addressing the basics as well as advanced topics. Throughout the book, we approach topics as a series of problems to be solved. Rather than documenting the API, we describe how to use WCF to accomplish your goals.
Prerequisites for this book are modest. If you're interested in WCF, you probably already have grounding in .NET. You're probably competent in C# or Visual Basic, or at least you were at one point. And, of course, you probably know your way around Visual Studio. So we're assuming that you're can write decent .NET code and are motivated to make the best use of your time in becoming proficient in WCF.
Installation Requirements
WCF is a key component of the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.x. WCF was first released with .NET 3.0 and has been enhanced in .NET 3.5. The delta between the two releases is modest: enhancements for non-SOAP Web services, integration between WCF and WF, and a healthy service pack. This book covers .NET 3.5. Unless there's a reason to use an older release, this is the clear recommendation.
.NET is packaged in two forms: the redistributable runtime libraries and the software development kit (SDK). The runtime libraries are meant for target machinesmdthose machines that are not for development. This includes testing, staging, and production environments. The SDK is meant for your development machines. The SDK contains code samples, documentation, and tools that are useful for development. Each of these .NET packages, the runtime and SDK versions, can be downloaded from Microsoft's MSDN site at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/default.aspx. The .NET 3.5 SDK also ships with Visual Studio 2008.
The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 can be installed on Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008.
Organization
We don't expect you to read the book cover to cover. If you're new to WCF, you may want to read and try the samples in Chapter 1, "Basics," first. Following that, each subsequent chapter covers a major feature set of WCF. We include a few introductory pages in each chapter to describe the motivation and some design goals, and then we cover subtopics within the chapter.
Chapter 1, "Basics," is where we cover the basics of building and consuming WCF services. We discuss and demonstrate how to implement different types of interfaces and why you may choose each. By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to produce and consume services using the WCF.
Chapter 2, "Contracts," covers the three primary types of contacts in WCF: service contracts, data contracts and message contracts. Each of these enables you to define complex structures and interfaces in code. Data contracts map .NET types to XML, service contracts expose service interface endpoints in WSDL that can be consumed in a cross-platform manner, and message contracts enable developers to work directly on the XML in a message, rather than working with .NET types. For each of these contracts, WCF tools generate and export standards-based WSDL to the outside world.
Chapter 3, "Channels," covers channels and channel stacks. The channel model architecture is the foundation on which the WCF communication framework is built. The channel architecture allows for the sending and receiving of messages between clients and services. Channel stacks can be built to exactly match your needs.
Chapter 4, "Bindings," describes how to configure the communication stack to use exactly the protocols you need. For instance, if you're communicating within an enterprise and won't be crossing firewalls, and you need the fastest performance, a binding named netTcpBinding will give you best results. If you're looking to communicate with every last Web client out there, then HTTP and text encoded XML is necessary, so basicHttpBinding is the way to go. A binding is synonymous with a preconfigured channel stack.
Chapter 5, "Behaviors," covers service behaviors. In WCF, behaviors are the mechanism for affecting service operation outside of the actual message processing. Everything that is done after a message is received but before it is sent to the service operation code is the domain of behaviors. In WCF, this is where concurrency and instance management is handled, as well as transactional support. This chapter also demonstrates how to build custom behaviors for additional service control.
Chapter 6, "Serialization and Encoding," describes the process by which data is serialized from a .NET Type (class) to an XML Infoset and the way that XML Infoset is represented on the wire. We typically think of XML as a text document with angle brackets around field names and values, but the XML Infoset...
