Choosing an endpoint address
It's great that we've talked about the important C (the contract) in the ABCs of WCF endpoints, but the story is far from complete. So far, we have a service definition completely devoid of transport information. Where does someone go to consume this service? The goal of the endpoint address is to:
- Tell us the communication scheme
- Tell us the location of the service
WCF provides a number of out-of-the-box communication schemes for accessing WCF services. These include options such as:
- HTTP
- TCP
- MSMQ
When looking at a service URI such as https://packt:8081/VendorService/SecureVendorService.svc, what am I able to infer from this WCF address? First, I can see that I'm using an HTTP/S scheme in order to secure my HTTP transmission channel via SSL certificates. Next, I can tell that the domain hosting this service is called packt and uses port 8081 for the HTTP/S traffic. Finally, I can gather the path of the service that I wish to call.
We'll see shortly...
