Windows Communication Foundation - Overview

Before getting into an overview of Windows Communication Foundation, it’s important to explain about SOA i.e Service Oriented Architecture. The W3C defines Service-Oriented Architecture as "A set of components which can be invoked and whose interface descriptions can be discovered and published". In simple terms SOA helps to integrate distributed applications by means of interface in terms of protocols and functionality.

With the above definition in mind, now we can move to WCF i.e. Windows Communication Foundation. It can be considered as a Microsoft’s contribution towards SOA. It is a platform, a framework if you will, for creating and distributing connected applications.

Simply we can define WCF as follows

WCF = Web Service +.Net Remoting + MSMQ + COM