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Thursday, 5 July 2012

WCF Architecture

Windows Communication Foundation Architecture

The following figure illustrates the major layers of WCF Architecture :



WCF Components

The major components of WCF are :
  • Contracts
  • Service Runtime
  • Messaging
  • Activation and hosting

Contracts
Specifies what a service can do(Exposes methods and their attributes).
  • Service Contract
  • Data Contract
  • Message Contract
  • Policy and binding  
Service Runtime
Specifies the service behaviors occurs during actual operation(run time).
  • Throttling
  • Error
  • Metadata
  • Instance
  • Message Inspection
  • Transaction
  • Concurrency
  • Parameter Filtering
  • Dispach
Messaging
Specifies the message flow at run time(customize message contracts, message security/authentication, processing the contents of message).

  • WS-Security Channel
  • WS-Reliable Messaging Channel
  • Encoder
  • Http Channel
  • Tcp Channel
  • Transaction Flow Channel
  • NammedPipe Channel
  • MSMQ Channel
Activation and Hosting
Specifies how services can be hosted/executed, so client applications can consume the service.
  • Windows Activation Service/IIS
  • Windows Service
  • Self Hosting
  • EXE 

Next Topic : Endpoints: Address, Binding and Contract