Introduction

WCF services are exposed through service endpoints, which provide the basic access point for client to utilize the functionality offered by a given WCF service. Service endpoints consist of ABC and a set of behaviors. What is ABC? Well, A stands for Address, which tells service consumers “Where is the service?”, B stands for Binding, which describes “How to talk to the service?” and C stands for Contract, which shows “What functionality can the service provide?”

WCF provides plenty of built-in bindings (such as BasicHttpBinding, NetTcpBinding, NetMsmqBinding, and so on), which can help developers host service endpoints over various transport protocols. Behaviors also play an important role in WCF. By using behaviors, we can gain further manipulation over the WCF service at service or endpoint level.

This chapter provides eight recipes on using the built-in binding and behaviors to build various service endpoints, which represent some of the useful scenarios in general WCF service...