What is WCF?

WCF is the acronym for Windows Communication Foundation. It is Microsoft's latest technology that enables applications in a distributed environment to communicate with each other.

WCF is Microsoft's unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. It enables developers to build secure, reliable, transacted solutions that integrate across platforms and interoperate with existing investments. WCF is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and simplifies the development of connected systems. It unifies a broad array of distributed systems capabilities in a composable, extensible architecture that supports multiple transports, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies, and hosting models. It is the next generation version of several existing products—ASP.NET's web methods (ASMX) and Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE) for Microsoft .NET, .NET Remoting, Enterprise Services, and System.Messaging.

The purpose of WCF is to provide a single programming model, that can be used to create services on the .NET platform, for organizations.