Chapter 1. Implementing a Basic HelloWorld WCF Service

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft's unified programming model to build service-oriented applications. It is built on Microsoft's .NET framework and unifies a broad array of distributed systems capabilities in a composable, extensible architecture that supports multiple transports, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies, and hosting models.

In this chapter, we will first learn basic WCF concepts and then implement a simple WCF service from scratch. We will build a HelloWorld WCF service by carrying out the following steps:

• Creating the solution and project
• Defining the WCF service contract interface
• Implementing the WCF service
• Hosting the WCF service in IIS Express
• Creating a client application to consume the WCF service