subject: Advantages Of Wcf [print this page] WCF or Windows Communication Foundation is Microsoft's programming model which unifies the communication mechanism between different web services and other distributed systems. Since there are a variety of platforms deployed all over the web which are making use of different web services for communication purposes, WCF provides a great advantage in order to resolve the translation issues between them. Earlier, a separate translation mechanism was to be integrated in order to make different services communicate but now, WCF takes care of it. Developers of services, can concentrate on developing the actual functionality as other parameters like secure delivery, reliability and performance are handled by WCF.
There are other benefits of using WCF in creating service based applications, like:
--->Enhanced Security: WCF imparts security features while transmitting messages and encrypts them so that users have to authenticate themselves before accessing the packet. Security protocols like SSL can also be implemented for additional security of messages.
--->Durable messages support: WCF supports durable message types, which are never lost even if the connection gets interrupted. These messages are presented in a durable message array and are continuously stored in the database. When any kind of network interruption takes place, even if the message packet is lost the same message is re-transmitted after the connection is restored.
--->Loosely coupled service: WCF enables developers to code loosely coupled services i.e. service oriented applications using service oriented architecture or SOA. This allows a client to connect to any service as soon as all the necessary requirements are met by the client instead of coding an application to connect to a particular service only.
--->Logging mechanism: WCF has a log trace mechanism integrated in it, which helps developers to trace the log during maintenance activities. Other technologies can also provide such solutions, but require extra efforts in order to continuously report through a log. WCF provides tracing capability by enabling the trace mechanism from the config (or configuration) files.
WCF is highly beneficial for the people who require additional capabilities like creating multiple entry points and customizing the behavior of the service according to the requirements of the user.
WCF can also maintain the transaction and the state of the service when in use, which means that in the case of network issues, the state of any transaction can be restored in an effective manner. This provides the rollback mechanism to any service or application from any kind of information loss during a network interruption.
