Live Blog - Day 1 Pluralsight BizTalk Course - Intro to WCF for BizTalk Developers

• What is WCF?
• Again, Microsoft's next way of distributed dev technology
• "open up your mind" - not just WS-* - universal framework to communicate with anything
• Reminiscing about DCOM :) ah, DCOMCONFIG
• If (DeveloperTask==Communication && OS==Windows) - love it!
• Stack extremely pluggable
• WCF Channels
• WCF communicates using a set if objects that work together in a cooperative manner to implement a particular communication requirement
• Objects are referred to generally as "Channels"
• A set of Channel objects is known as a "Channel Stack"
• Infrastructure exactly identical on client and server (not ASMX)
• Channel Stack
• Transport Channel
• One of these
• Listens for new messages or sends messages
• Active (MSMQ) listeners and passive (HTTP)
• Encoder
• One of these
• Turns network
• Wire or Protocol Channels
• Channel Managers
• Channel stack instances are created by Channel Managers
• Channel Manager type determines the direction of communication
• Two types
• Channel Listener
• Channel Factory
• Messages
• Message are based on SOAP Envelope/Header design
• Created by the Message Encoder
• Messages are modeled as XML Infoset
• Endpoint
• Represents a actually physical point for communication
• Made up of Address, Binding, Contract (ABC's of Indigo)
• Sender (client) has one outgoing
• Client process can have multiple senders
• Receiver (service) can have many
• Address
• Specifies the physical address
• Used by the transport channel
• Scheme dictated by transport type
• Encapsulated by the Uri class
• Generally in config
• Binding
• Object that represents the channel stack to use for a particular endpoint
• Often exposes properties which change the properties of one ir more of the channels and/or the encoder
• A Binding is really just configuration
• Binding is used to create the Channel Stack and then is ignored
• Can be declared via code or in an config file
• A Binding is a Binding is a Binding
• OOB Bindings preconfigured for common scenarios
• OOB Bindings never meant to be exhaustive
• Binding system is totally OPEN (CustomBinding or new Binding type allowed)
• OOB Bindings - discussion of them
• Example of configuring binding in config
• Contracts
• ServiceContract
• Applied to .NET type def (generally an interface)
• Defines PortType in WSDL
• OperationContract
• Applies to interface method
• Defines the operation on PortType
• Demo - Writing WCF HelloWorld