Introduction

When developing WCF services, we look at ServiceContract, endpoint, and binding configurations, which are very important in the service-oriented design view. However, under the service-oriented design view, there are many raw components that construct the WCF client and service. All these raw components provide a Channel model that allows developers to develop WCF services at a very low level. Instead of service operations and method parameters, we will work with raw Message objects directly at the Channel Model programming layer. Though the Channel Model programming adds more complexity, it does give much more flexibility and a clearer overview of how the WCF runtime works under the hood.

In this chapter, we will go through the common use cases at the WCF Channel and Message layers. The first and second recipes demonstrate how to use ChannelFactory and the Channel object model to consume a WCF service. The third recipe shows how to build a raw WCF service through the ChannelListener...