New Open Source Project: Windows Communication Foundation -- Visual Studio Magazine

New Open Source Project: Windows Communication Foundation

The newest work-in-progress WCF that's targeting .NET Core is now being open sourced on GitHub.

By Michael Domingo
05/28/2015

Early last week, The .NET Foundation announced that Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), the Microsoft unified programming model for building service-oriented apps, is now an open source project.

This version of WCF targets .NET Core 5, which is the small optimized runtime based on ASP.NET 5. According to a blog post from WCF Project Lead Ron Cain, the release candidate version of Visual Studio 2015 that debuted during the Build conference at the beginning of May "supports the ability to use WCF in both Universal Windows and ASP.NET 5 applications." Any updates to WCF moving forward, he said, would be to developing that version, and will also be extended to support Linux and Mac at some point.

"Right now the WCF project builds on Windows, but .NET Core offers the potential for it to run on OS X and Linux," said Martin Woodward, executive director of the .NET Foundation, in a blog post.

Currently, the following WCF libraries are available in the Windows Store:

ServiceModel.Primitives
ServiceModel.Http
ServiceModel.NetTcp
ServiceModel.Duplex
ServiceModel.Security

Cain's blog also lists several bindings, transport-level bindings, message-encoding binding elements, and a number of other features that are in development, as well as known issues. WCF is on GitHub.

"WCF was big news back in the days when SOAP was new and everyone was expecting it to become the norm," wrote Mike James, an editor at i-programmer.info. "Today WCF looks over complex for many tasks and it is mostly important to existing projects that were inspired by SOAP in the early days. Of course having WCF available for mobile apps might make a difference."

The .NET Foundation is an independent organization that manages quite a few open source projects. While it stresses its independence, a number of members of its board and advisory council are employed at Microsoft and have been past executives within Microsoft ranks.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.