Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a platform for building service-oriented applications.  The following are some of the highlights in WCF:

  • Defines the following three core contracts with its consumers when creating WCF services: Service contract, Data contract, and Message contract.
  • Use of service endpoint to expose WCF services to consumers.
  • Availability of various service hosting applications: managed application such as Console application, Windows service, or Windows Forms application, Web server using IIS or Windows Process Activation Service (WAS).  WAS also supports non-HTTP protocols such as TCP, MSMQ, and named pipes.  Also available is the WCF-provided host (wcfSvcHost.exe).