In the modern world, enterprise applications are the key to consumer-centric enterprises. Users access one or multiple devices to connect to the external world. And to succeed at this, the business needs shared services, which can be consumed by all such devices.
The service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a design principle that enterprises follow to outline well-defined services, using a common set of contracts. Each of these services can be individually modified independently of one another and consumed by the external world.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework to build such service-oriented applications. Using WCF, you can send data/messages asynchronously from one endpoint to the other. You can host a service endpoint in IIS, or in an application directly. The messages passed via this service endpoint can be a single character or a word sent as XML, or a complex stream of binary data.
WCF has been widely accepted as a standard to create web services...
