Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

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CHAPTER 7 ■ .NET 3.0: WINDOWS COMMUNICATION FOUNDATION
WCF and Productivity
As mentioned earlier, there are many technologies available for building distributed
applications. From Microsoft alone, you can use COM+, .NET Enterprise Services,
MSMQ, .NET Remoting, Web Services, and Web Services Enhancements (WSE), to name
just a few. Each of these requires different domain knowledge and different programming
skills.
WCF incorporates all of these into a single programming model, reducing this overall
complexity and making it easier for the developer to focus on the business logic that you
are paid to produce. Additionally, this allows you to combine each of these technologies
into an application in ways that may not be possible today. As you work through this
chapter, you’ll see how, through configuration changes in .config files, you will be able
to finely control different services that may have required reams of code before WCF!
Figure 7-1 shows the pre-WCF stack of technologies that can be used to build connected
applications.
These technologies are described in the following list:
ASMX Web Services: You’ve used this throughout this book. It is a technology that
makes web services easy to implement and deploy. It includes the basic Web Services
technology and interoperability stack, allowing for stateless connected applications
that use SOAP to communicate with clients and servers on Microsoft or other technology
stacks.
WSE: As web services have evolved, so have the standards that implement them. New
requirements have brought about new standards in security, addressing, and more.
Microsoft continually updates WSE to bring these standards to ASMX services.
Messaging: The System.Messaging namespace in the .NET Framework allows programmatic
access to Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ). This allows developers to build
messaging-oriented middleware applications where reliable delivery of messages
between systems is paramount.
Remoting: The System.Remoting namespace in the .NET Framework allows object
sharing across the network, giving remote users access to application classes,
objects, and more. This also provides location transparency, easing distributed
application development.
Enterprise Services: The System.EnterpriseServices namespace in the .NET Framework
allows programmatic access to a set of classes that allow you to build
enterprise-grade applications that use COM+ to support critical systems
functionality such as transactions.