WCF production and development environments
WCF was first introduced in Microsoft's .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) version 2.0. The corresponding framework is .NET 3.0. To develop and run WCF services, Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 or above is required.
Visual Studio is the preferred IDE for developing WCF service applications. Both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 support WCF service application development. Visual Studio 2008 also supports application development for .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 (this is called multi-targeting), and Visual Studio 2010 supports application development for .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0.
The following table shows all of the different versions of the .NET runtimes, .NET Frameworks, and Visual Studios, along with their relationships:
|
CLR |
.NET Framework |
Components |
Visual Studio | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
CLR 4.0 |
.NET 4.0 |
Parallel Computing |
2010 | |||||||||
|
.NET 3.5 SP1 |
ASP.NET MVC LINQ |
Entity Framework |
LINQ to Entities |
Cloud Computing |
2008,2010 | |||||||
|
CLR 2.0 |
.NET 3.5 |
LINQ to SQL LINQ to XML LINQ to Objects |
ASP .NET AJAX |
REST |
RSS |
2008,2010 | ||||||
|
.NET 3.0 |
WCF |
WPF WF CardSpace | ||||||||||
|
.NET 2.0 |
Winforms |
ASP.NET |
ADO.NET |
2005,2008,2010 | ||||||||
|
CLR 1.0 |
.NET 1.1 |
Winforms |
ASP.NET |
ADO.NET |
2003 | |||||||
|
.NET 1.0 |
2002 |
