Understanding Windows Communication Foundation Extensibility

Summary: Provides a detail about the extensibility mechanisms existing in WCF. This paper covers each extensibility point in detail and, more importantly, when to use which one. This article assumes basic knowledge of WCF and it’s concepts.

Windows® Communication Foundation (WCF) is the new unified communication programming model for building service-oriented applications. It’s one of the three pillars of the NET 3.0 platform that’s part of the new Windows® Vista operating system, and it also runs on Windows® XP and Windows® 2003.

The relevance of this new technology is that it unify all previous methods for building distributed systems: ASMX, Remoting, Enterprise Services (COM+), WSE (Web Service Enhancements) and MSMQ (Message Queuing), and all that diversity may certainly sound good but in fact imposes knowing very different programming models to developers and choosing one over another can be hard and costly.

Developing this kind of technology is not easy and many people at Microsoft devoted many years of their lives in it’s creation, solving very complex problems and designing a unique architecture where everything has the right level of abstraction, flexibility and extensibility.

WCF has three main aspects that define it’s design: the unification of several existing Microsoft communication technologies, support for cross-vendor interoperability, and support for explicit service-orientation, but extensibility is a very important implementation detail that could make developer’s live easier and could push the adoption of this new technology.

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