Windows Communication Foundation Primer : Defining the contract

What is WCF?

In a nutshell, WCF is a framework for building and hosting services. Hosted by the Microsoft platform, WCF services make use of standard technologies to offer a wide range of cross-platform security, transaction, and communication capabilities.

Before WCF came along, .NET developers, who built distributed applications had to choose between communication schemes such as ASP.NET web services, .NET remoting, and MSMQ. This choice carried with it implications for how the component was designed, developed, deployed, and consumed. If you went with ASP.NET web services, you were committing to XML message formats and were handcuffed by limitations of the HTTP transport protocol. If you chose .NET remoting, you were able to process messages in an efficient fashion, but immediately limited yourself to .NET-only service clients. MSMQ is wonderful for disconnected applications, but in choosing it, you've eliminated any chance at having a synchronous, request-response conversation with a software client.

The goal of WCF is to unify these many technologies and provide a single transport-neutral development paradigm with common aspects for security, transactions, and exception handling. The service is implemented independent of the communication protocol strategy. This is a fairly revolutionary concept that introduces immense flexibility to service designers. Instead of building services with tightly coupled and rigid endpoints that do not welcome change, we can design flexible services that are capable of supporting a wide range of current and future consumers.

Defining the contract

Unlike ASP.NET web services, WCF truly promotes a "contract first" design style where developers need to thoughtfully consider how the outside world will interact with their service. There is a clean separation between the interface definition and the actual implementation of the service. When building ASP.NET services, the developer typically takes a code-first approach, where .NET classes are decorated with attributes and exposed as services. In the WCF model, we focus first on the data being shared and what our interface to the outside world should look like (i.e. the contract). Only after this critical step is complete does the WCF developer begin to design the actual service implementation logic.

There are actually three different contracts you may define for a WCF service. These are:

• Service contract

• Data contract

• Fault contract

Service contracts

The service contract explains what your service can do. It's built using a .NET interface class and decorated with WCF attributes that identify it as a service contract. A basic service contract looks like this:

[ServiceContract()]
public interface IVendorContract
{
[OperationContract()]
void InsertVendor(string vendorId, string vendorName);
[OperationContract()]
bool DeleteVendor(string vendorId);
}

Notice that the interface has a ServiceContract attribute and each operation that we wish to expose publicly on our contract has an OperationContract attribute. Each of these metadata attributes has a series of optional parameters that let us explicitly define public characteristics of the service. For instance, we can add the Name and properties to the ServiceContract to better characterize this service in our environment. We can also add a series of properties to the OperationContract SOAPAction value is set to. Why give an alternate name to a service operation? Consider scenarios where you have an overloaded operation in your WCF service contract, and need each WSDL operation to have a unique public name. C# (and .NET) support overloading, but the WSDL standard no longer does. Namespace to control what the operation is named and the

[ServiceContract(Name="VendorService", Namespace="http://Seroter.BizTalkSOA/Contracts")]
public interface IVendorContract
{
 [OperationContract(Name="InsertVendor")]

void InsertVendor(string vendorId, string vendorName);
 [OperationContract(Name="InsertVendorWithContact")]

void InsertVendor(string vendorId, string vendorName, string vendorContactName);
[OperationContract(Name="DeleteVendor")]
bool DeleteVendor(string vendorId);
}


					  

As you can probably imagine, services often need to accept and return comprehensive data entities in addition to simple type parameters. I might want to model a data entity such as a customer instead of having a service operation accept 15 individual string parameters. Complex data parameters are categorized as data contracts in WCF. A data contract is a .NET class object decorated with the DataContract attribute and whose public properties are flagged with DataMember attributes. Public service operation definitions can only include complex types identified as data contracts.

[DataContract()]
public class VendorType
{
private string vendorId;
private string vendorName;
private string vendorContactName;
[DataMember()]
public string VendorId
{
get { return vendorId; }
set { vendorId = value; }
}
[DataMember()]
public string VendorName
{
get { return vendorName; }
set { vendorName = value; }
}
[DataMember()]
public string VendorContactName
{
get { return vendorContactName; }
set { vendorContactName = value; }
}
}


					  

Much like the service contract, the attributes of the data contract allow for more fine-grained control of the entity definition. For instance, we may provide a Name and Namespace to the DataContract, while also adding some useful node ordering and existence attributes to the member elements.

 [DataContract(Name="Vendor" Namespace = "http://Seroter.BizTalkSOA/Types")]

public class VendorType
{
private string vendorId;
private string vendorName;
private string vendorContactName;
 [DataMember(IsRequired=true, Order=0)]

public string VendorId
{
get { return vendorId; }
set { vendorId = value; }
}
[DataMember(IsRequired=true, Order=1)]
public string VendorName
{
get { return vendorName; }
set { vendorName = value; }
}
[DataMember(IsRequired=false, Order=2)]
public string VendorContactName
{
get { return vendorContactName; }
set { vendorContactName = value; }
}
}