Reasons To Use Wcf In Web Applications

By Author: Softweb Solutions
Total Articles: 5
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Windows Communication Foundation [WCF] is an application programming interface [API] in the .NET framework useful for building connected and service oriented applications. By WCF, data can be sent from one service endpoint to another as a asynchronous message. The WCF client connects to the WCF service thru an endpoint that has an URL and binding properties specifying how data will be sent.

The messages can be a simple message like a single character or word that can be sent as XML or it can be a complex one as a stream of binary data. Mainly, WCF offers a manageable approach to create web services. Using WCF in building web applications, the development of endpoint becomes easier and faster than ever.

WCF has many useful features that are discussed below –
1] Service Orientation
WCF enables developers to create service oriented apps. SOA – Service Oriented Applications gives confidence to the web services for sending and receiving the data. These services benefits of being loosely coupled rather than hard coded between the apps which mean that clients can easily connect to all services as far ...
... as the necessary requirements are met.

2] Boosts Security
With the use of WCF, messages can be encrypted for securing the privacy. The feature - users should require authentication before accessing or receiving the messages can be incorporated with WCF for security reasons. Security can be also implemented by using some popular standards such as SSL or WS – SecureConversion.

3] Durable and Reliable Messages
WCF supports durable and reliable messages. Durable messages are the ones which are never lost because of any kind of interruptions at the time of communication. These messages are constantly saved in the database, so that messages are recovered in case of loss of the connection. Also, WCF exchanges messages using reliable sessions implemented over WS Reliable messaging and using MSMQ.

4] Extensibility and Interoperability
The architecture of WCF has some extensibility points that are beneficial when additional functionalities are required in the web application. Moreover, it implements all modern industry standards for the web service interoperability.

5] AJAX and REST Support
WCF can be easily configured for processing plain XML data that is not wrapped up in a SOAP envelope. Also, it is possible to extend WCF to support some specific XML formats like ATOM, etc or non-XML formats like JSON [JavaScript Object Notation].

6] Multiple in-built Transport Protocols
The messages in WCF can be transferred by using any in-built transport protocols and encodings. The most used transports in WCF are HTTP, HTTPS, TCP and named pipes. It also includes some additional transport protocols and encoders. The messages can be easily encoded in WCF as text or using the optimized binary format to send using MTOM standard efficiently.

By using WCF in the web application development, these beneficial features can be incurred. The only limitations of using WCF is – it takes some time to get used to different security and transport types and because it is managed by Microsoft the interoperability is little difficult.

Softweb Solutions offers customized and on-time WCF Development services. Also, we customize our WCF services in SharePoint 2010 for delivering most effective solutions to all our clients. Contact us at info@softwebsolutions.com for more information on our services or if you are looking for professionals who expertise in building Windows User Interface and rapid service oriented apps.