On Wednesday February 21, 2007 I had the opportunity to present my "Intro to WCF" presentation to the
Atlanta VB .Net Study Group as part of the Microsoft .Net University series. Devry University has been kind enough to let the group use its facilites at its Alpharetta campus. Doug Turnure, Microsoft Developer Evangelist will be presenting the fourth and final session on Cardspace next month.
My presentation began with a discussion of the .Net Framework 3.0 and the technologies that it includes (WF, WCF, WPF, and Cardspace). I also spoke in general terms about Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and included these fundamental concepts:
- It is a design methodology.
- It leverages existing investments
- It uses loosely coupled messaging.
- It facilitates and encourages reuse.
- It is standards based which implies interoperability
- SOA does not mean web services.
I began with a high level overview of what WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) is:
- WCF is an SDK for building service oriented applications on the Windows platform.
- It enables us to use classic CLR constructs, such as classes and interfaces to deploy and consume services.- The programming model is declarative and largely attribute driven.WCF presents a unified programming model to distributed technologies including Web Services, Remoting, Enterprise Services, Message Queueing and Interprocess Communication. It is highly interoperable because it is based on WS* protocols and is compatible with existing Microsoft distributed technologies. Microsoft also has made a considerable investment working with other vendors to ensure compatibility.
I presented three code based demos to support my presentation. The first demo was a simple client and service. Although, I am more comfortable with C#, I did this demo in VB .Net because after all, it is a VB group. The second demo displayed how to use three different transports HTTP, TCP, and named pipes to invoke a WCF service. The last demo was a cross technology sample using WPF, WCF, and Cardspace. It also featured token caching and calling two WCF web services using a WPF Winform client.I concluded the presentation by fielding questions and presenting resources. There are some hands on
virtual labs available from Microsoft that are a great place to learn about WCF essentials. . Another URL to bookmark is the
.Net 3.0 web site from Microsoft for information about WCF and the other .Net 3.0 technologies.
I will be presenting at the
Atlanta MDF group on March 12 on the topic of "Developing Message-Based Asynchronous Applications with SQL Server 2005 Service Broker. See you there!!
