What are the ABCs of WCF?
A - stands for Address: Where is the service?
B - stands for Binding: How do I talk to the service?
C - stands for Contract: What can the service do for me?
- Address
Every website and webservice has an address, like http://www.hired4sure.com/ or http://www.hired4sure.com/test.asmx. WCF services also must have an address. WCF can
- provided addresses for the following protocols:
- HTTP
- TCP
- NamedPipe
- Peer2Peer
- MSMQ
- Binding
A binding specifies how a service is accessible. Think transport protocol , encoding (text, binary, etc) and WS-* protocols like transactional support or reliable messaging. - Contract
The contract is something you completely specify by yourself. The contract is used to specify what your service can do. For example give you the correct streetname and city when providing a zipcode