Which protocols are there, that can be used with WCF?

Question

Am reading an O'Reilly book called "Learning WCF" and in chapter one, it mentions: For example, services can be accessed over a variety of supported protocols, including named pipes, TCP, HTTP, and MSMQ.

And now I can't help but wonder... Named pipes, HTTP, TCP and MSMQ and what other protocols? Didn't they just mention all protocols that are available for WCF or are there more protocols available, but not mentioned?

And how to use those other protocols? And is it possible to even add more protocols?

Answer 1

The point is that WCF is extensible - you could write your own custom bindings to use custom protocols. People have for example written in-process/null transport bindings.

Out of the box, I agree that this pretty much covers it (you might want to consider HTTPS as a separate protocol, maybe not).

Answer 2

For the serialization format, you can also use protobuf-net, a .net implementation of Protocol Buffers.

Answer 3

Yes that covers all the transport channels that comes out of the box. You can implement custom channels, like this example at MSDN, where a UDP channel is used for WCF.

It is also possible that the word protocol is intended to be interpreted as all variations of application layer protocol as well. e.g. BasicHttp, WSHttp, WS-* etc.