2009 International Conference on Web Information Systems and Mining
A Service-Oriented Distributed Framework—WCF
Wei Zhang
College of Computer and Information Engineering
Shanghai University of Electric Power
Shanghai, China
zhangweismile@163.com
Abstract—WCF(Windows Communication Foundation) ,one of
Microsoft's revolutionary products, represents a new step in
distributed programming. In this paper, after the concepts of
WCF are introduced, its pillars(SOA, interoperability and
integration, unification) are discussed and layered architecture
is explored, then the difference between WCF and Web
services is summarized . Finally, current state of popular
technologies is given, and the future importance of WCF is
pointed out.
WCF , SOA, interoperability, integration, unification, Web
services, distributed development
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, distributed system has made considerable
progress, with the increasing popularity and scale of
computer application. Meanwhile, more demands are put
forward to it, such as openness, security, scalability,
concurrency, transparency and so on. Especially, the
applications need to work together, need to exchange since
they are seldom totally independent. And generally they run
on different hardware, different operating systems, and
different platforms. After all, each hardware type, operating
system, and platform can have its own type system, memory
management scheme, transports, and protocols. Recognizing
the need to bridge the gap between various environments,
Microsoft developed what is known as the Windows
Communication Foundation (WCF).And regards it as one of
Microsoft's revolutionary products.
It says WCF which was code-named Indigo is a unified
programming model for building service-oriented
applications. It enables developers to build secure, reliable,
transacted solutions that integrate across platforms and
interoperate with existing investments[1].Because of the
exciting features, WCF has aroused widespread concern.
II. THREE PILLARS OF WCF
A. Addressing the SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture)
needs
For years, software development has focused on how to
best reuse the code that we write. Object-oriented
development put forward the idea of building reusable
classes from which could be inherited in order to reuse the
978-0-7695-3817-4/09 $26.00 © 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/WISM.2009.69
Guixue Cheng
College of Computer and Information Engineering
Shanghai University of Electric Power
Shanghai, China
richie_cc@126.com
base class functionality. But it was language-based reuse and
didn’t facilitate the dynamic evolution of software at
runtime. Later, component-orientation overcame the
challenges. It provided interchangeable, interoperable binary
components, so possibility for cross-language
interoperability, and forced the developer to think about the
external facing interface of the application, which enabled us
to build systems that dynamically load and bind to new
functionality at runtime[2]. But tight coupling is its
important limitation. Distributed applications built with it
need a common platform and operating system, and have to
version simultaneously. Such characteristics make it
unsuitable for a variety of network environment. Now,
service-orientation offers a tremendous leap forward. It is a
collection of well-defined services, where each individual
service can be modified independently of other services to fit
the ever-evolving business[3].The communication is
reflected in the publishing and consumption of services by
the message-based approach based on open standards.
Overall, SOA adheres to the following four tenets of service-
orientation, which help ensure that the services are extremely
flexible and resilient to change, thereby reducing long-term
maintenance costs. And WCF takes SOA concepts of
message passing, schema, contract, and policy, and
implicitly applies it to all of the services. As such, WCF
provides the SOA programming model.
Tenet 1:Boundaries are explicit. It specifies that the
messages must be able to cross explicit and formal
boundaries regardless of what is behind those boundaries,
which means a service can be deployed anywhere and be
easily and freely accessed by other services, rather than
considering the environment or development language of the
other services[4].With WCF, the attribute-based programming
enables developers to explicitly define external service
contracts. Without explicitly defining these, no functionality
will be exposed publicly.
Tenet 2: Services are autonomous. It states that each
service must be managed and versioned differently so as to
not affect other services in the process, which supports the
inevitable evolution of the service’s implementation over
time. It is obvious since the underlying implementation
details are hidden from the consumer, any change to the
implementation will not affect the service as long as the
contract does not change[3].
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 Tenet 3: Services share schema and contract. Services
pass schemas and contract rather than classes and types. And
the clients use them to generate their own code to call the
service. This allows for a loosely coupled system where
neither service requires knowledge of each others’ internal
workings in order to exchange data—they only need the
published schemas and contracts.
Tenet 4: Service compatibility is determined based on
policy. This is how services interact. Services look at each
others’ policy, looking for similarities so that they can start
communicating. With WCF, the services communicate
through dynamically negotiated communications channels
that support the necessary semantics (security, reliability,
etc). Service policy statements create automatically based on
configuration, class attributes, and method signatures. Client
channels automatically configured via retrieved service
policy.
B. Interoperability and Integration
In fact, through the above discussion, interoperability and
integration issues are a matter of course, however, due to its
importance, a separate list for discussion.
WCF interoperability and integration fall into two key
scenarios. For interoperability, the ability to communicate
with applications running on other platforms provides the
flexibility you need when working in a heterogeneous
environment. And for integration, the ability to communicate
with existing applications protects the investments and
provides an optional, incremental upgrade path to WCF.
How to achieve it with WCF? Thinking of the well-
known Internet, there exist so diverse network styles. But the
Internet could connect them together to communicate as we
know. The key is TCP/IP protocol. Similarly, with WCF, the
key is message-based approach based on open standards, as
mentioned above. As a result of being based on open
standards and using messages that are generic and not
representative of any specific platform and programming
language, it’s easy to achieve a high degree of loose coupling
and interoperability across platforms and
technologies[3].SOA focuses on the message rather than the
implementation, platform, or runtime of the service itself.
So what is the “open standards”? It is WS-* protocol,
which is a family of specifications that define universal
message structures and messaging choreographies. This
family of specifications includes WS-Addressing, WS-
Security, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation, WS-
Federation, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-
AtomicTransaction, WS-Coordination, WS-
MetadataExchange, WS-Policy, and WS-PolicyAttachment.
They use message structures based on XML and SOAP. And
they are a de facto standard message format, providing a
vendor-agnostic way for applications to communicate
reliably, securely, and in a transacted manner[5].WCF fully
embraces SOAP and WS-*.
C. Unified programming model
Until now, developers have had a plethora of technology
choices to choose from for building distributed applications,
such as ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX)，Web Services
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Enhancements (WSE) ，MSMQ，.NET Remoting and so
on. Each programming model has a different set of APIs,
different feature sets, and a different core set of scenarios:
.NET Remoting — an efficient means of communication
between .NET Framework applications by exposing the CLR
type system remotely and providing location transparency
for objects, if all nodes in a distributed application are .NET
Framework applications.
MSMQ—a set of objects to perform queue messaging in
Windows, which is a best choice for an application required
guaranteed message delivery and durability.
ASMX — a way to expose the functionality of remote
components via standard web protocols and provide
interoperability with web services running on non-Microsoft
platforms.
WSE — a supported extension to the .NET Framework
that provides end-to-end standards-based security for Web
services.
Enterprise Services —an offering of managed APIs to
COM+ which provides component-based programming for
doing enterprise critical functionality such as transactions.
And so on, not detailed here one by one. So it is very
difficult to pick the right technology for the job due to their
diversity and isolation from one another as mentioned above,
and further complicated by the fact that several of these
technologies overlap in the features they provide (most
notably in the areas of transactions and security)[6].
Furthermore, combination is required in practical
applications. For example, if the designers want to use the
ASMX, as well as want to provide direct reliable messaging
guarantees. Or if want to use .NET Remoting for it's rich
extensibility model, as well as want a ES-style transaction to
flow. There is no good option to accomplish it, before WCF.
WCF fuses these different distributed technologies and
unifies them under one programming model, as shown in
Table I[5].
TABLE I. WCF FEATURE COMPARISON
.Net
Feature WSE ASMX COM+ MSMQ WCF
Remoting
WS-* support √ √ √
BasicWebServiceint
eroperability √ √ √
.NET-to-.NET
√ √
communication
Distributed
√ √ √
transactions
Queued messaging √ √
(note:“√” figures the item supports the corresponding feature )
In addition, WCF is designed to reduce development
complexity and make developers that are already familiar
with existing technologies such as ASP.NET,.NET remoting
and Web Services feel comfortable with the new
technology[8].Besides, it provides integration and
interoperability with existing .NET technologies as
mentioned above.
 III. WCF ARCHITECTURE
Casually observing WCF, it appears remarkably simple.
The services are deployed, discovered and consumed as a
collection of endpoints, each of which is the fusion of the
address, binding, and contract, known as ABC. And a service
must have at least one endpoint ,as illustrated Fig. 1[10].
Client Server
endpoint endpoint
C B A A B C
message endpoint
A B C message
Figure 1. communication through the endpoint
An address defines where the service is, including the
location of the service and the transport protocol. The
location portion of the address indicates the name of the
target machine, site, or network; a communication port, pipe,
or queue; and an optional specific path, or URI (Universal
Resource Identifier).The transport protocol includes
HTTP,TCP,MSMQ and so on.
A binding defines how to communicate with the service.
The communication relates to multiple aspects, such as
message encodings, transport protocols, security options,
communication patterns and so on. Bindings group together
sets of such communication aspects suitably to make
developers easily deal with communication function. WCF
provides built-in bindings that fill common needs such as
Basicbinding, TCPbinding, IPC binding and so on .Besides,
developers could customize it.
A contract specifies what operations the service can do.
WCF defines four contracts, including service contract
which describes operations the client can perform on the
service, data contract which describes data types passed to
and from the service, fault contract which depicts the errors
raised by the service and how the service deals with errors,
and message contract which allows the service to interact
directly with messages[9].
However, taking a closer look at a WCF ,it is a complex
platform. This can be felt a little from Fig. 2[10].
304
Client Server
ServiceModel Dispatcher
Proxy
Layer
…… ……
Reliability Channel Reliability
Layer
Security
Security
Encoding
channels Encoding
channels
Transport Transport
Figure 2. ServiceModel Layer and Channel Layer
WCF is a layered architecture, split into two major
layers: the ServiceModel layer and the Channel layer. And
the real work of messaging is in the Channel layer. A
channel carries out messaging like a pipe. A message is sent
form the sender to the receiver like through the channel
“pipe”. As linking a number of these pipes together, with
each pipe has it own specific function, a channel stack forms.
Each channel carries out one aspect of the messaging
functionality in an application. For example, if a WCF
application requires security, reliability and transactional
capability, one channel will be used for security, another for
reliability, and another for transactional capability. So
according to the application’s requirement, channels could be
stacked in various ways. In essence, the binding, mentioned
earlier, controls the channel stack. A specific binding means
a specific channels. So there is no concrete, one-size-fits-all
channel type definition as there is no concrete binding. Fig.2
just illustrates the composition of a typical channel stack.
However, using channel stack directly is complex. So
WCF has the ServiceModel layer, a higher-level abstraction
layer. It is the bridge between the application and the
Channel layer, offering an easy-to-use API with classes,
methods, attributes, and configuration to build connected
applications. Notice the ServiceModel layer is called the
Proxy on the sender, responsible for creating messages to
send to the Channel layer, and the Dispatcher on the receiver,
responsible for deserializing received messages, instantiating
an object, and dispatching the deserialized message contents
to that object[10][11].
IV. COMPARISON WITH ASP.NET WEB SERVICES
In recent years, interoperability based on Web services
has caused a great deal of attention and research. And WCF
could achieve it. So what is the difference?
In terms of performance, WCF is 25%—50% faster than
ASP.NET Web services[12].Besides, from a developer’s
point, there are following differences between them[13].
Firstly, considering message representation, the header of
the SOAP message can be customized in Web services.
Besides, in WCF, special attributes such as
MessageContractAttribute , MessageHeaderAttribute and
MessageBodyMemberAttribute are provided to depict the
structure of the SOAP Message.
Secondly, in terms of serialization, the development of
Web services relies on the XmlSerializer to serialize .NET
types to XML ,while the WCF uses the
DataContractAttribute and DataMemeberAttribute to
accomplish it . And DataContractSerializer is better
performance over XMLserialization and able to explicitly
indicate which fields or properties are serialized into XML
which XmlSerializer couldn’t realize.
Thirdly, in regard to service description, WSDL (Web
Services Description Language) is generated to describe the
service as issuing a HTTP GET Request with query WSDL,
and can be customized by deriving the class of
ServiceDescriptionFormatExtension in Web services. In
WCF, WSDL is generated as issuing a Request with the
query WSDL for the .svc file and can be customized by
using ServiceMetadataBehavior class.
Fourthly, about client development, the command-line
tool WSDL.EXE is used to generate the client for service in
Web services, whereas the ServiceMetadata tool(svcutil.exe)
is used in WCF.
Fifthly, concerning exception handling, unhandled
exceptions are returned to the client as SOAP faults in Web
services, whereas unhandled exceptions are returned to
clients for debugging according to a configuration setting in
WCF.
At last, thinking over developing service, instead of
adding the WebService attribute to the class and WebMethod
Attribute to any of the class methods in ASMX, in WCF, the
ServiceContractAttribute is added to specify that a interface
defines a WCF service contract, OperationContract attribute
is used to indicate which of the methods of the interface
defines the operations of the service contract. In brief, Web
services attribute the specific method. WCF attributes the
interface, which brings about loosely coupling the host of
the service from the implementation and leads to hosting
WCF services not only in IIS but console applications,
Windows forms and so on, since any class that implements
the interface can be a service, due to programming to an
interface. And it is flexible that how to expose the service is
up to the developer’s configuration which gives the ability
that the code is written once but could be repurposed
according to the need.
Overall, both WCF and Web services support the
characteristic of interoperability. But WCF is more flexible,
powerful but complex than Web services. It requires
developers take more effort to master it.
V. SUMMARY
So far, the previous discussion is just a start about WCF.
There is so much more to it, such as security, transaction
,reliable session, COM+ integration, data integration issues,
peer-to-peer communication and so on. Although it is just
the brief and shallow study, the attractive features of WCF
are still appreciated obviously.
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Nowadays, among the variety of distributed application
technologies, COM+ still plays an important role in the
industrial control field, but is gradually fading out. Web
services ever is considered as a panacea for integration of
cross-platform applications and get widely used, but
constrained due to the performance bottleneck. Perhaps the
upgrading of hardware could provide a better help to the
problem. WCF represents a new step in distributed
programming for developers with more features than were
possible before as previously discussed. This new
technology ,as important part of Microsoft’s strategic plan,
represents the development direction of the software
architecture design, and get applied in the distributed
application more and more. The popularity of the technology
will be enhanced If Microsoft could support a convenient
tool to integrate the existing distributed interface.
In any case, it can be expected that WCF will hold
important status in the future development of distributed
application.
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