Choosing an endpoint address

It's great that we've talked about the important C (the contract) in the ABCs of WCF endpoints, but the story is far from complete. So far, we have a service definition completely devoid of transport information. Where does someone go to consume this service? The goal of the endpoint address is to:

• Tell us the communication scheme
• Tell us the location of the service

WCF provides a number of out-of-the-box communication schemes for accessing WCF services. These include options such as:

• HTTP
• TCP
• MSMQ

When looking at a service URI such as https://packt:8081/VendorService/SecureVendorService.svc, what am I able to infer from this WCF address? First, I can see that I'm using an HTTP/S scheme in order to secure my HTTP transmission channel via SSL certificates. Next, I can tell that the domain hosting this service is called packt and uses port 8081 for the HTTP/S traffic. Finally, I can gather the path of the service that I wish to call.

We'll see shortly how to actually set up a WCF service to listen on the address of your choice. For now, simply note that the address of a service is a key part of the whole service endpoint.