Distributed and Enterprise Development Services
Web Services and WCF
The global acceptance of Web services, which includes standard protocols for application-to-application communication, has changed software development. The functions that Web Services now provide include security, distributed transaction coordination, and reliable communication. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is designed to offer a manageable approach to distributed computing, broad interoperability, and direct support for service orientation.
WCF simplifies development of connected applications through a new service-oriented programming model. WCF supports many styles of distributed application development by providing a layered architecture. At its base, the WCF channel architecture provides asynchronous, untyped message-passing primitives. Built on top of this base are protocol facilities for secure, reliable, transacted data exchange and broad choice of transport and encoding options.
The typed programming model is designed to ease the development of distributed applications and to provide developers with expertise in ASP.NET Web services, .NET Framework remoting, and Enterprise Services, and who are coming to WCF with a familiar development experience. The service model features a straightforward mapping of Web Services concepts to those of the .NET Framework common language runtime (CLR), including flexible and extensible mapping of messages to service implementations in languages such as Visual C# or Visual Basic. It includes serialization facilities that enable loose coupling and versioning, and it provides integration and interoperability with existing .NET Framework distributed systems technologies such as Message Queuing (MSMQ), COM+, ASP.NET Web services, Web Services Enhancements (WSE), and a number of other functions.
Windows Workflow Foundation
Creating and executing a workflow in software poses unique challenges. Some business processes can take hours, days, or weeks to complete. How can a developer maintain information about the workflow's current state for this length of time? This kind of long-running workflows will also typically communicate with other software in a non-blocking way. How can the challenges of asynchronous communication be made easier for developers? And while modeling fixed interactions among software is relatively straightforward, people tend to want more flexibility, including things such as the ability to change a business process on-the-fly. How can the workflow handle the diverse and unpredictable behavior of humans? Without the right foundation to build on, meeting requirements like these is hard. Yet if technology explicitly designed to support workflows is available, creating this useful kind of software can be straightforward.
Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) was created to address these requirements. A core component of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0+, is a fundamental part of the Windows platform for developers. Windows Workflow Foundation provides a common framework for building workflows into Microsoft applications, whether those workflows coordinate interactions among software, interactions among people, or both.
WWF provides a programming model; in-process workflow engine designed and developed to implement long-running processes as workflows within .NET applications.