WCF Services—Hello World with Interfaces

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WCF Services Requirements § Install .NET 3.0 Development Service Contracts § Contract First or Code? Service Design Programming Model "Hello, World" "Hello, World" with Interfaces WCF Service Service Client Proxy Proxy Generation with Visual Studio Proxy Generation with SvcUtil.exe Client Code Hosting on IIS ServiceContract Attribute OperationContract Attr. ServiceBehavior Attribute OperationBehavior Attr. Data Contracts § Summary

© 2007 Chris Peiris, Dennis Mulder

"Hello, World" with Interfaces

A best practice in WCF is to define a contract up front, as an interface, and then provide the implementation of that interface in a concrete class. Why? This provides a clear abstraction of the contract from the implementation. The other aspect of this approach is a clear distinction of the service boundary (remember the "boundaries are explicit" SOA tenet) from the implementation. Although the service interface definition is in code, and not in metadata, it’s a clear perimeter that permits some flexibility for exposing only what’s necessary and that provides design-time and configuration-time flexibility.