300Microsoft Visual Studio 2010: A Beginner’s Guide
Key Skills & Concepts
●Create a Web Service
●Deploy a Web Service
●Write a Client That Consumes the Web Service
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a .NET technology for creating Web services. A Web service is software that provides functionality that can be used by
any other software application, using any programming language, on any hardware and operating system that can communicate over a network.
The functionality of Web services can be either public or private. Examples of public Web services might be a weather service where you provide the location and you get back a forecast data that you can display on your screen or an address verification application that will validate if a postal address exists or suggest alternatives. Examples of private Web services might be the ability for multiple applications in a large corporation to call a customer Web service with a customer ID and receive that customer’s record, or perhaps an ordering system where you can submit a new customer order and the Web service would process the submission in the background for you.
What’s common about all of the examples in the preceding paragraph is that, regardless of public or private, the Web service is useful for more than one application or system. Everyone needs the same service from the Web service, so why should each application
You must be wondering how such a broad claim can be made that one technology is accessible by any system regardless of platform, language, or software. The Web service is separated from the calling system via open standards and a
