Live Blog - Day 1 Pluralsight BizTalk Course - WCF for BizTalk Developers Continued

• DataContract
• Attribute which controls serialization/deserialization between .NET and XML
• New serialization layer
• Hmm, ClientViaBehavior allows us to use tracing tools like TcpTrace and make it cool with WS-Addressing (didn't know about this)
• Behaviors
• Objects that change the semantics of the *service* or *client* not the contract
• Don't affect what is on the wire
• Must be consistent with the bindings
• Hosting
• A WCF Service can be hosted in any .NET app
• ServiceHost/ServiceHostFactory can be used to simplify hosting layer
• IIS/WAS integration allows robust auto-execution hosting environment (uses ServiceHost implicitly)
• Tools
• Building the Client
• WCF/BizTalk
• BT's integration with WCF in R2 surfaces some interesting WCF features
• Features in question:
• XmlFormatter (Xml Serialization support)
• Generic messaging contracts
• Serialization
• DataContract is WCF's "native" serializer
• Limited to subset of XML schema spec
• E.g. elementFormDefault = unqualified not supported
• WCF also supports XmlSerializer
• Necessary for many interop scenarios
• Using the XmlSerializer
• XmlSerializerFormat can be applied to a ServiceContract or OperationContract
• Operations inherit from Service
• MessageContract
• Using MessageContract instead of DataContact  gives yopu more control over the complete SOAP message
• Some serialization rules apply
• Can add Custom SOAP Headers
• Can control write format (Wrapped versus Unwrapped)
• Helps get rid of "innate RPCness in WCF"
• With data contract, get the name of a method as the root element of the XML!
• Want <HelloMessage>
• Using just "Message"
• System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message is the low-level type that WCF uses for communication