Windows Communication Foundation Service (WCF )

While these technologies provide a wide range of functionality, they exist in silos – isolated from one another. This creates an impedance mismatch across the technologies hindering our ability as developers to “compose” or combine functionality across them. For example:

We want to use .NET Remoting for its rich extensibility model, but we want an ES-style transaction to flow. How do we do this? Or we want to use ASMX for its interoperability, but you want to provide direct reliable messaging guarantees. How is this accomplished?

Today, scenarios like these that involve the combination of functionality across these technologies are more of a challenge than it should be. They often involve hundreds and sometimes thousands of lines of code to accomplish. With WCF, the challenges of silo programming models become a thing of the past. WCF provides you with a unified programming model that brings together the best aspects of existing Microsoft technologies. What this means is that, with WCF, you will no longer need to wonder “which technology do I use (ASMX, Remoting, etc)” when building a connected system. All of the application-to-application and intra-application communication for your connected will be handled by WCF. This unified programming model is exposed to you through the System. Service Model namespace. Since WCF provides all of the features of these existing Microsoft technologies, WCF supports all of the scenarios currently supported by these technologies.

Features Table 2