Summary

Section 25.1 Introduction

• WCF is a set of technologies for building distributed systems in which system components communicate with one another over networks. WCF uses a common framework for all communication between systems, so you need to learn only one programming model to use WCF.

• WCF web services promote software reusability in distributed systems that typically execute across the Internet.

• Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is an XML-based protocol describing how to mark up requests and responses so that they can be sent via protocols such as HTTP. SOAP uses a standardized XML-based format to enclose data in a message.

• Representational State Transfer (REST) is a network architecture that uses the web’s traditional request/response mechanisms such as GET and POST requests. REST-based systems do not require data to be wrapped in a special message format.