Chapter 5. Configuring WCF

For some developers, the mere word administration has been known to cause boredom and indifference However, for systems that use Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), administration means more than just working to keep an application running well. One of the real strengths of WCF is the ability to postpone certain types of technical decisions until very late in the development cycle. In particular, you can decide on the transportation protocol (Web services, Transmission Control Protocol [TCP], Microsoft Message Queuing [MSMQ]) and channel requirements (security, reliability, and so on) toward the end of the process. To some, this might not seem like much of an advantage, but in many cases, architectural decisions that are made early in the development cycle limit the options that are available throughout the rest of the coding process. Although some choices must be made at the beginning of a project, some questions are better delayed until as late in the project as possible to provide the maximum flexibility when the application is deployed. When choosing the underlying communications mechanism, WCF greatly assists in postponing this decision until, in some cases, the run-time characteristics of the application are configured.

To achieve this goal, certain concessions have to be made. For example, in the case of WCF, the definition of the channel requirements must be moved outside of the application’s code. In the world of .NET, "outside of the application’s code" means "configuration files." This is not to say that WCF cannot be configured through code, but many of the choices can be indicated declaratively in the configuration file as well as imperatively through code. This chapter covers the basics of configuring WCF, using both techniques.