What a Service is,
A Service is a program or application that is used by other applications. In other words, a service that is directly consumed by the end user to do their work and is something they ask for and recognize Or It's just self-contained business functionality.
What a WCF Service is:
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was introduced in .NET 3.0. This is a great network distributed system developed by Microsoft for communication between applications. WCF is meant for designing and deploying distributed applications under a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation. From MSDN: Windows Communication Foundation is a part of the .NET Framework that provides a unified programming model for rapidly building service-oriented applications that communicate across the web and the enterprise. WCF is a combined feature of Web Service, Remoting, MSMQ and COM+.
There are the following three main components of a WCF application.
- WCF Service class: A WCF Service class implements some service as a set of methods.
- WCF Service host: WCF supports four types of hosting, IIS, Windows Process Activation Services (WAS), self-hosting and Windows Services.
- WCF Service endpoints: All communication with a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service occurs through the endpoints of the service. Usually the name of the Interface will be specified in the contract, so the client application will be aware of the operations that are exposed to the client.
Each endpoint contains:
- Address: An address that indicates where to find the service.
- Binding: A binding that specifies how a client can communicate with the service.
- Contract: A Contract that specifies what can the service do for us.
