Chapter 41. Creating and Consuming WCF Services

During the years several technologies were developed for distributed applications that communicate over networks. The idea is that client applications can exchange information with a service via a network protocol such as the Http or TCP, just to mention some. Among these technologies there are SOAP (an Xml-based information exchange system), Microsoft Messaging Queue (a message-based system), the well-known Web services, and the .NET Remoting (which connects applications based on the .NET Framework). Although powerful, all these technologies have one limitation: Two or more applications can connect only if all of them rely on the same technology. Just for clarification, an application based on MSMQ cannot communicate with another one based on SOAP. To avoid this limitation, Microsoft created the Windows Communication Foundation (also known as WCF for brevity) technology that was first introduced with the .NET Framework 3.0 and that is basically a unified programming model for distributed applications. With WCF developers can write code for exchanging data and information between services and clients without worrying about how data is transmitted because this is the job of the .NET Framework. WCF is another big technology and covering every single aspect would require an entire book; therefore, in this chapter you learn about implementing, configuring, hosting, and consuming WCF services with Visual Basic 2010.