What is the Window Communication Foundation (WCF)?

Window Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework to build service-oriented applications. It lets us send asynchronous messages from one service endpoint to the other service endpoint.

A service endpoint can be a service hosted by the application, or a part of a service hosted by IIS.

WCF is used to build, configure, and deploy network-distributed services. With the help of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), the WCF client communicates with the server. It is very similar to ASP.NET web services.

Advantages of WCF

Some of the advantages of WCF are listed below:

• WCF is considered one of the fastest technologies used for communication, and it offers excellent performance.

• We can configure WCF to work without SOAP; we can use the RSS instead of SOAP.

• WCF uses WS specifications to provide security, reliability, and transaction management.

• There are no delays even if there is high traffic. This is because queuing messages can be queued with the help of persistence.

• Distributed transaction management and object life-cycle management apply to any WCF-developed application.