Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a software development kit for developing and deploying services on Windows. WCF provides a runtime environment for your services, enabling you to expose Common Language Runtime (CLR) types as services and to consume other services as CLR types. Although in theory you could build services without WCF, in practice building services is significantly easier with WCF. WCF is Microsoft's implementation of a set of industry standards defining service interactions, type conversions, marshaling, and the management of various protocols. Consequently, WCF provides interoperability between services.
WCF provides developers with the essential off-the-shelf plumbing required by almost any application, and as such, it greatly increases productivity. The first release of WCF (as part of .NET 3.0) provided many useful facilities for developing services, such as hosting, service instance management, asynchronous calls, reliability, transaction management, disconnected queued calls, and security. The second release of WCF (as part of .NET 3.5) provided additional tools and extended the original offering with additional communication options.
WCF also has an elegant extensibility model that you can use to enrich the basic offering. In fact, WCF itself is written using this extensibility model. The rest of the chapters in this book are dedicated to exploring those aspects and features.
WCF is part of .NET 3.5 and requires .NET 2.0, so it can run only on operating systems that support it. Presently, this list consists of Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 or later.
Most of the WCF functionality is included in a single assembly called
System.ServiceModel.dll, located in the System.ServiceModel namespace.
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