y - Net Developer

CHAPTER 2 ■ INTRODUCING WCF BASICS 29ramrameshreddy.blog.comdeveloping loosely coupled distributed applications. SOA is a vision of services that have welldefinedinterfaces. These loosely coupled interfaces communicate through messages describedby XML Schema Definition (XSD) and through the message patterns described by WSDL. Thisprovides for a great base architecture for building distributed applications. Since a web serviceand its clients are independent from each other, they need to adhere only to the XSD and WSDLdocument standards in order to communicate.The next Microsoft offering to address SOA is WCF. We’ll now discuss how WCF complementsweb services and enhances their value.What Does WCF Solve?WCF is not just another way of creating a distributed solution but provides a number of benefitsover its predecessors. If you look at the background of WCF, you’ll find that work on WCFstarted with the release of .NET. Microsoft unveiled this technology at the Microsoft ProductDevelopers Conference 2003 in Los Angeles, California. In other words, it has taken years tobuild and come to market. WCF addresses lots of issues, and Figure 2-1 shows the three maindesign goals of WCF:• Unification of existing technologies• Interoperability across platforms• Service-oriented developmentService-OrientedDevelopmentInteroperabilityAcross PlatformsramrameshreddyramrameshreddyUnification ofExisting DistributedTechnologyFigure 2-1. Design goals of WCF