Introduction.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. It enables developers to build secure, reliable, transacted solutions that interoperate with applications in different platforms.
Interoperability is the fundamental characteristic of WCF. The fundamental communication mechanism is based on Web Services specifications such as SOAP, XML, XSD, WSDL and newly established standards including the WS-* protocols. These specifications address several areas, including basic messaging, security, reliability, transactions, and working with a service's metadata.
WCF relies on WS-Policy and WS-Metadata Exchange to discover information about the communications partners. Reliable communication is essential for most situations (no duplicates messages), and WS-Reliable Messaging would be used to interact with many of the other applications in this scenario. WS-Security and the related specifications might also be used for establishing a secure channel. The specifications support the main security services such as authentication, integrity and confidentiality. WS-Atomic Transaction is very important for managing transactional context involving several transactional resources.
The key point is that WCF implements interoperable Web services, complete with cross-platform security, reliability, transactions, and other services. It also is transport neutral, protocol neutral, and format neutral. For example, services are free to make use of HTTP, TCP, named pipes, and any other transport mechanisms for which there is an implementation. It is possible the WCF-to-WCF communication to be optimized, but all other communication uses standard Web services protocols.
The architecture.
The architecture is based on layers. See on Figure 1.
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