What is WCF?

Question

Can someone please explain in simple terms what WCF is? It's hard to distill the meaning from the Wikipedia page.

Answer 1

WCF is microsoft's new .NET do-all extensible communications framework meant to replace functionality previously available in DCOM, .Net Remoting and ASMX web services.

Answer 2

WCF stands for Windows Cummunication Foundation. It's Microsoft's attempt to sort out and simplify network programming. It's provide an easy to use level of abstraction over different communication protocols and transportation methods. It's allows you to concentrate more on what you want to implement rather than thinking on how to implement. Read Mircosoft's WCF FAQ for more info.

Answer 3

WCF allows you to create "services" without specifying that it's a Windows service or a Web service, or which protocols are used to communicate with it or how the data is serialized.

All those details may be specified externally, either programmatically in a service host or via the config file.

Answer 4

WCF - Windows Communication Framework - is Microsoft's framework to make inter-process communication easier. It let's you do this communication through various means, plain old asmx web services, Remoting, MS Message Queuing, and a couple more.

It let's you talk with other .NET apps, or non-Microsoft technologies (like J2EE). It's extensible enough to allow for newer stuff, like REST too (I don't think REST is built-in).