Menu
What is WCF in simple terms?
It's hard to distill the meaning from the Wikipedia page.
429
WCF stands for Windows Communication Foundation. It is a framework for building, configuring, and deploying network-distributed services. Earlier known as Indigo, it enables hosting services in any type of operating system process.
This hosting is very flexible and easy to use, but suitable only during development phases of a distributed application. IIS: When a WCF service is hosted in IIS the client can access the service over the internet.
WCF is a general-purpose, message-based communication system to enable you to create distributed systems - you have a bunch of services somewhere on your servers, which offer up to perform certain functions on the client's behalf, when they call. WCF is something like web services - only much more than that.
NET framework with Windows Vista, and then got updated several times. WCF 4.5 is the most recent version that is now widely used.
WCF - Windows Communication Framework - is Microsoft's framework to make inter-process communication easier. It let's you do this communication through various means, plain old asmx web services, Remoting, MS Message Queuing, and a couple more.
It let's you talk with other .NET apps, or non-Microsoft technologies (like J2EE). It's extensible enough to allow for newer stuff, like REST too (I don't think REST is built-in).
175
WCF allows you to create "services" without specifying that it's a Windows service or a Web service, or which protocols are used to communicate with it or how the data is serialized.
All those details may be specified externally, either programmatically in a service host or via the config file.
45
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
