Inside Windows® Communication Foundation

Chapter 6. Channels

In this chapter:

Channels in Perspective 152

The Channel State Machine 153

Introduction to Channel Shape 163

Channel Interfaces and Base Types 166

Channel Flavors 175

Creating a Custom Channel 178

Channels send and receive messages. Channels are responsible for work at the transport layer and for WS-* protocol implementations, security, and transactional processing. Channels are highly composable—in other words, they can be stacked in various ways to create the functionality required for a given application. Channels are extensible, and the WCF application programming interface (API) is intentionally designed in a way that allows framework developers to create custom channels when necessary.

For the most part, channels are hidden from ...