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The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), formerly known as Indigo, is the long-term solution from Microsoft for connected systems. It provides APIs that subsume Web services, remoting, messaging and all other connectivities. It is built around Web services architecture and is designed to provide secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperabilitybased on open standards. It is intended to span across multiple transports, security systems, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies, and hosting models. It will be at the core of the upcoming Windows Vista (formerly Longhorn) series as well as have backward support for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Due for release in 2006, WCF is intended to interoperate cleanly with all systems (including Java EE systems), but as it evolves it is worth monitoring over time to prove out its adherence to standards before the decision is made to use or deploy it in a diverse system. WCF is Microsoft's next generation "unified" programming platform as well as runtime environment that supersedes various technologies including ASP.NET Web services (ASMX) with WSE extensions, Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ), the Enterprise Services / COM+ runtime environment and .NET Remoting. It addresses the limitation of RPC-based or synchronous Web services, where RPC-based Web services are invoked over HTTP/S (with limited support of transport protocol bindings) and is limited to the request-reply communication model (limited invocation mechanism). To build a service in WCF, developers need to know the service address (for example, where the service is), the service binding (the data transport protocol such as SOAP over HTTP), and the service contract (for example, what kind of data should be passed). Developers can use an IDE (such as Visual Studio 2005) to build and test their application codes. In addition, they need to define the services (for example, type of services or service endpoints), behaviors (for example, how the service should interact under particular circumstances) and bindings (and binding types) in the file called web.config before the service can be created and deployed. Developers can also use svcutil.exe, an import and export tool for converting between service meta-data and application codes, to create proxy codes for the client. WCF does not just add new programming APIs or new functionality. It provides different programming approaches to build services, but not necessarily Web services.
WCF is fairly complex and is still evolving before the final release. It is much more powerful in its interoperability features than WSE or other .NET technologies. For example, WCF supports MTOM, Metadata Exchange or MEX, and SAML 1.1. These are fairly significant interoperability features. From an interoperability perspective, it is important to understand that it provides flexible programming approaches to build services and interacts (and interoperates) with Web services implemented in different protocols and technologies. The table below ummarizes the .NET interoperability capabilities of ASMX, WSE, and WCF
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