.NET Framework 4 released with some exiting new features and applauded improvements in the area of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). These WCF enhancements focus primarily on
• Simplifying the developer experience
• Enabling more communication scenarios and
• Providing rich integration with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) by making “workflow services” a first-class citizen moving forward.
The good news is that most of the WCF 4 changes focus on making today’s common scenarios easier and making new communication scenarios and development styles possible. As a result, moving your existing WCF solutions to .NET 4 will be fairly seamless in terms of migration. Then you simply decide which WCF 4 features you want to take advantage of in your solutions moving forward.
WCF 4 comes with a wide range of specific features. These feature areas summarize most of what’s new in WCF 4 and they highlight the top-level opportunities offered by this release of the .NET framework.
Simplified Configuration
Simplification of the WCF configuration section through support for default endpoints, binding and behavior configurations. These changes make it possible to host configuration-free services, greatly simplifying the developer experience for the most common WCF scenarios.
Discovery
New framework support for both ad hoc and managed service discovery behaviors, which conform to the standard WS-Discovery protocol.
Routing Service
New framework support for a configurable routing service that you can use in your WCF solutions. Provides features for content-based routing, protocol bridging, and error handling.
REST Improvements
Enhancements to WCF WebHttp Services with some additional features and tooling that simplify REST service development.
Workflow Services
Rich framework support for integrating WCF with WF to implement declarative long-running workflow services. This new programming model gives you the best both frameworks have to offer (WCF & WF).
