The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)—formerly known as Indigo—is Microsoft's new connected systems platform for Windows. This is the first in a WCF article series covering everything from first principles and "Hello, World!" to building fully connected applications.
by Laurence Moroney
October 6, 2005
he WCF is an incremental, yet evolutionary technology that brings all the formerly distinct and separate Microsoft connectivity technologies together under a single umbrella within the System.ServiceModel namespace. Included in WCF are Web services (ASMX), the Web service Extensions (WS*), Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), Enterprise Services, COM+, and .NET Remoting.
Having a single namespace that subsumes all of these into a coherent package is enormously useful, and makes designing, developing, and deploying applications that require connectivity far simpler. With WCF you won't have to choose between implementations in a variety of different namespaces and coding types to create a connected application. Whether your application connects via loosely coupled Web services, or tightly coupled Enterprise Services, the coding model will be consistent and the transition between different communication types will be much smoother—because they will all be using the same programming namespace.
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he WCF is an incremental, yet evolutionary technology that brings all the formerly distinct and separate Microsoft connectivity technologies together under a single umbrella within the System.ServiceModel namespace. Included in WCF are Web services (ASMX), the Web service Extensions (WS*), Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), Enterprise Services, COM+, and .NET Remoting.
