I need advice regarding WCF and n-tier

Question

First off, i'm fairly new to programming, I've built a few asmx web services but I am a little lost regarding how I should set up a WCF web service. I've tried to research this over the past couple days by reading through a lot of the documentation/articles/videos on MSDN but I'm still a confused.

Since my current web services are hosted on a separate box using IIS, from what I understand I need to create a WCF Library, then reference the Library in another WCF App and then host that app in IIS and reference the WCF App from my Front End? Seems like an extra step to me...? Not to mention a pain when developing on my local box.

Any advice or a point in the right direction would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

WCF gives you the option of sharing common assemblies (i.e. so both your service and clients can use the same domain model library), but it's not a necessary step.

You can host a WCF service through ASP.NET, same as ASMX. The "WCF Service Application" project template in Visual Studio configures it this way by default - as a WCF service hosted in IIS.

For the most common scenarios, it's really no different from ASMX. You create a WCF Service application, deploy it to a web server, and add service references in client applications. The importer will automatically generate classes for you, so you don't need to reference any assembly. No extra steps.

If you haven't already, you really should have a look through Microsoft's Tutorial. You'll find the steps very similar to those for setting up an ASMX-based architecture.