Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

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CHAPTER 7 ■ .NET 3.0: WINDOWS COMMUNICATION FOUNDATION
from these sections to understand the big picture and get confident enough for a deep
dive into the technology, should that be what you desire.
To get started building WCF, you’ll first build a new WCF service. Visual Studio 2008
supports these; if you are using Visual Studio 2005 or VWDE 2005, however, note that
you’ll need the .NET Framework 3.0 runtime components and the .NET 3.0 extensions
for Visual Studio (code-named Orcas) before you continue.
Launch your IDE and select File ➤ New Web Site. The New Web Site dialog will
appear (see Figure 7-3). If you are using Visual Studio 2008, remember that you need to
use the .NET Framework 3.0 or .NET Framework 3.5 filter to be able to see WCF Service
as an option.
Figure 7-3. Creating a new WCF service
Once you’ve selected your service and placed it on either the file system or your local
IIS, Visual Studio will create the project files and open the editor. You’ll notice a new file
type, with the .svc extension. As you can probably guess, this is a service. The SVC file
structure is a lot like the base ASMX file that we saw earlier. It simply defines the language,
the debug mode, the service class, and the location of the code-behind. Here’s an
example: