ABCs of WCF

The following is the contents of this article:

In earlier days a developer needs to do a lot of ground work to shape the communication architecture between the components, but now Microsoft provides WCF, a flexible programming framework that abstracts a lot of complexity in creating the services. So the communication foundation is already laid/available for the developers. It allows the developers to only concentrate on the problems. One of the finest benefits I saw in WCF is that the same business logic could be implemented in various protocols and transport options. So that your service can be exposed to any type of client.

With a simple and elegant example, I will just try to explain endpoints in WCF. Imagine that you are trying to send a birthday gift to your beloved ones living near your city. What exactly is the information you really need to send away? The first and foremost is the address, where the gift needs to be delivered. And the second one is how will the gift be transmitted? What are all the transport options available to reach that address? By train or bus? And the last one you must know what is the content you are transmitting. What type of goods is it? Yes in WCF to define an endpoint ABC is required to establish the communication. A stands for Address, B stands for Binding and the C stands for Contract. Please try to match the ABC with the example I mentioned above, then you will understand what I mean. Anyway, we will discuss this topic in detail here. Once you define the ABCs, everything will be taken care of by WCF.

A: Address

Where exactly os your service hosted? In other words, what is the location of the service? An address could be an IP Address, server name, URL and so on.

The preceding is the format of an address. Whereas the first part is the transport schema, in our case HTTP is the transport schema, whereas the second part is the server location. In our case OnlineShoppingServer.com is the server location. And the next part is the PORT number where the server is listening for incoming requests. And the final part is the relative location of the resource on the server.