Notes on Programming WCF - Part II - Bindings, Enpoints, MetaDataExchange

Excerpts on a great WCF book: "Programming WCF Services- by Juval Lowy"

Bindings:

WCF defines six frequently used bindings:

1- Basic binding Offered by

1- BasicHttpBinding class

2- Exposes a WCF as legacy ASMX web service

2- TCP binding offered by

1- NetTcpBinding class for

2- cross machine communication on Intranet

3- optimized for WCF-to-WCF

3- IPC binding offered by

1- NetNamedPipeBinding class

2- It uses named pipe as transport for

3- same- machine communication

4- Fastest binding since lighter than TCP

4- Web Service (WS) binding offered by

1- WSHttpBinding

2- Uses HTTP, HTTPS

3- Uses WS-* standards

5- Dual WS Binding offered by

1- WSDualHTTPBinding

2- Bidirectional Duplex

6- MSMQ binding offered by

1- NetMsmqBinding class

Table 1-1. Transport and encoding for standard bindings
Name	Transport	Encoding	Interoperable
BasicHttpBinding	HTTP/HTTPS	Text, MTOM	Yes
NetTcpBinding	TCP	Binary	No
NetPeerTcpBinding	P2P	Binary	No
NetNamedPipeBinding	IPC	Binary	No
WSHttpBinding	HTTP/HTTPS	Text, MTOM	Yes
WSFederationHttpBinding	HTTP/HTTPS	Text, MTOM	Yes
WSDualHttpBinding	HTTP	Text, MTOM	Yes
NetMsmqBinding	MSMQ	Binary	No
MsmqIntegrationBinding	MSMQ	Binary	Yes

Endpoints:

Every service is associated with an address that defines where the service is, a binding that defines how to communicate with the service, and a contract that defines what the service does. This triumvirate governing the service is easy to remember as the ABC of the service. WCF formalizes this relationship in the form of an endpoint.

Endpoint is the ABC of a service

1. Address

2. Binding

1. Binding Configuration

3. Contract

Metadata Exchange

By default, the service will not publish its metadata. However, this does not preclude clients that have obtained the metadata via some other mechanism from invoking operations on the service. A service that does not publish metadata is the WCF analogy to an internal class in .NET.

There are two options for publishing a service's metadata: you can provide the metadata over HTTP-GET, a simple text-based protocol that most platforms support, or you can use a dedicated endpoint.

1- Create WSDL

2- Publish service’s Metadata

i. HTTP-GET : This need the service to have http address

This is enabled through service behavior configuration:

behaviorConfiguration = "MEXGET">

ii. Metadata Exchange Endpoint