Windows Communication Foundation 3.5 Unleashed (2nd Edition) by Craig McMurty, Nigel Watling, Matt Winkler, Marc Mercuri . Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft’s dynamic technology for allowing autonomous software to communicate. Superseding earlier technologies such as COM/DCOM, .NET Remoting, ASP.NET Web Services, and the Web Services Enhancements for .NET, WCF provides a single solution that is designed to always be the best way to exchange data among software entities. It also provides the infrastructure for developing the next generation of Web Services, with support for the WS-* family of specifications, and a new serialization system for enhanced performance. In the 3.5 release, WCF has been expanded to include support for REST, JSON, and Syndication (RSS and Atom) services, further broadening the possibilities for what can be done. For information technology professionals, WCF supplies an impressive array of administration tools that enterprises and software vendors can use to reduce the cost of ownership of their solutions without writing a single line of code. Most important, WCF delivers on the promise of model-driven software development with the new software factory approach, by which one can iteratively design solutions in a modeling language and generate executables from lower-level class libraries.
