Getting Started Tutorial WCF

The topics contained in this section are intended to give you quick exposure to the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) programming experience. They are designed to be completed in the order of the list at the bottom of this topic. Working through this tutorial gives you an introductory understanding of the steps required to create WCF service and client applications. A service exposes one or more endpoints, each of which exposes one or more service operations. The endpoint of a service specifies an address where the service can be found, a binding that contains the information that describes how a client must communicate with the service, and a contract that defines the functionality provided by the service to its clients.1

After you work through the sequence of topics in this tutorial, you will have a running service, and a client that calls the service. The first three topics describe how to define a service contract, how to implement the service contract, and how to host the service. The service that is created is self-hosted within a console application. Services can also be hosted under Internet Information Services (IIS). For more information about how to do this, see How to: Host a WCF Service in IIS. The service is configured in code; however, services can also be configured within a configuration file. For more information about using a configuration file see Configuring Services Using Configuration Files.

The next three topics describe how to create a client proxy, configure the client application, and use the client proxy to call service operation exposed by the service. Services publish metadata that define the information a client application needs to communicate with the service. Visual Studio 2012 automates the process of accessing this metadata and uses it to construct and configure the client application for the service. If you are not using Visual Studio 2012, you can use the ServiceModel Metadata Utility Tool (Svcutil.exe) to construct and configure the client application for the service.

All of the topics in this section assume you are using Visual Studio 2011 as the development environment. If you are using another development environment, ignore the Visual Studio specific instructions.

Note

If you are running Windows Vista or later versions of the Windows operating system, you must start Visual Studio by going to the Start menu and right clicking Visual Studio 2011 and selectingRun as Administrator. To always launch Visual Studio 2011 as an administrator you can create a short cut, right click the short cut, select properties, select the Compatibility tab, and check theRun this program as an administrator checkbox. When you start Visual Studio 2011 with this shortcut, it will always run as administrator.

For sample applications that can be downloaded to your hard disk and run, see the topics in Windows Communication Foundation Samples. For this topic, see, in particular, the Getting Started.

For more in-depth information about creating services and clients, see Basic WCF Programming.

In This Section

How to: Define a Service Contract
Describes how to create a WCF contract using a user-defined interface. The contract defines the functionality exposed by the service.

How to: Implement a Service Contract
Describes how to implement a service contract. Once a contract is define, it must be implemented with a service class.

How to: Host and Run a Basic Service
Describes how to configure an endpoint for the service in code and how to host the service in a console application. To become active, a service must be configured and hosted within a run-time environment. This environment creates the service and controls its context and lifetime.

How to: Create a Client
Describes how to retrieve metadata used to create a WCF client proxy from a WCF service. This process uses the Add Service Reference functionality within Visual Studio 2011.

How to: Configure a Client
Describes how to configure a WCF client Configuring the client requires specifying the en