Useful WCF Links for Programmers

If you are a .net professional, having at least an year of experience in application development, you might have heard about Web Services.

Continue reading if you would like to know about WCF.

WCF is a part of .NET Framework that provides a way of building service oriented applications that can communicate between objects across machines.

For example, A WCF service can serve results of a poll, live cricket scores, Stock Information..etc

I do not want to compare the WCF services with a usual web services again. Its done in hundreds of places. Here are few good links

http://www.techbubbles.com/wcf/wcf-vs-aspnet-web-services/

http://jai-on-asp.blogspot.com/2010/04/difference-between-web-services-and-wcf.html

Three Important things to know in WCF

Address - is where we communicate. URL that will be used internally to map requests and responses.

Binding - How we communicate. This is the protocol( a set of rules) that the server and client agrees and understands while communicating.

Contract - is what we communicate. There exists two types of contracts basically.

A Service Contract : specifies the operations a contract exposes, its signature, data-type, location and formats supported for communication.

A Data Contract : defines the structure and types of data exchanged in service messages. Describes the format of data, versioning system to manage changes in data

Few books you can refer

Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) by Pablo Cibraro, Kurt Claeys, Fabio Cozzolino and Johann Grabner

Essential Windows Communication Foundation (WCF): For .NET Framework 3.5 by Steve Resnick, Richard Crane and Chris Bowen

Guys who are interested in SOA implementation can refer the book

Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation by Amit Bahree, Dennis Mulder, Shawn Cicoria and Chris Peiris

A link which can quickly guide you creating your first WCF Service

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WCF/WCFOverview.aspx

Let us do more with WCF in coming weeks..

Have a great week.. happy learning :)

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