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The Latest News

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Articles & Whitepapers

Check out these whitepapers for more information on what WCF is and how to take advantage of it.

» From .NET Remoting to the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) by Ingo Rammer This article discusses potential scenarios for the integration and migration of your existing .NET Remoting based applications to the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, formerly codenamed Indigo) to take advantage of the new infrastructure for the creation of service oriented applications. » Introduction to Building Windows Communication Foundation Services by Clemens Vasters This paper explains the fundamental concepts of the Windows Communication Foundation and shows you how to start building services and clients. » Introducing Windows Communication Foundation: an Early Look by David Chappell Take a tour around the Windows Communication Foundation with this a broad overview of the WCF technology and benefits. » Building "Hello World" If learning by coding is your style, this article walks you through quickly building a simple service and client.

Documentation Updates

WCF Documentation CTP (15 Apr 2006) (~20MB download)

Videos from the Team

Learn more about WCF from team presentations on MSDN TV and Channel9:

Channel9 - Talking About SOA You've heard the buzzwords, but what does it really mean? Steve Swartz, WCF Architect, gives you his take on what Service-Oriented Architecture is, or, rather, what it isn't. » View Now

MSDN TV - WCF Security in a Nutshell Doug Purdy, Program Manager on the WCF team, explains how the WCF security model works, and serenades you in the process. » View Now

DotNetRocks - Mood Indigo In this podcast, Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell talk with Richard Turner and Anand Rajagopalan, Program Managers on the WCF team, to really dig into the WCF experience.     » Play  » Download

MSDN TV - People, Programs, and Devices So what can you do with WinFX? Well, if you're Don Box and Chris Anderson, architects on the WinFX team, you can do just about anything. » View Now

PDC Sessions

Didn't make it to the PDC this year? We've got you covered! Here are some of our most popular sessions:

Session # Title Presenter(s) COM200 Applications and Communications Roadmap Don Box and Dharma Shukla Watch   COM202 A Lap Around the Windows Communication Foundation Omri Gazitt Watch   COM322 WCF: Integrating COM+ and MSMQ Applications Andy Milligan and Anand Rajagopalan Watch COM307 Writing Reliable and Transacted Distributed Applications Shy Cohen Watch   COM326 Web Services for XML Programmers Doug Purdy Watch   COM312 Writing Secure Distributed Applications Martin Gudgin Watch

 
You can find all the PDC content at the Microsoft PDC site.

Windows Communication Foundation Talks

Are you trying to explain WCF to your development or management team? We've set up a series of talks that dive increasingly deeper into WCF, and provided PowerPoints that you can present inside your company.

Introduction to the Windows Communication Foundation The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), formerly known as “Indigo,” enables you to build secure, reliable, transacted solutions that integrate across platforms and interoperate with existing investments. This talk provides an overview of WCF and shows you how WCF will radically simplify the development of distributed applications. Download the slides! Watch this talk! Programming the Windows Communication Foundation WCF provides you with a unified, attribute- and config-based programming model for building distributed applications with maximum productivity. In this talk, you’ll learn how the WCF architecture was designed, how it works, and, most importantly, how you can leverage it to build service-oriented systems. Download the slides! Watch this talk! Building Secure Reliable Services with the Windows Communication Foundation Service-oriented applications often run in environments that require secure, reliable, and/or transacted messaging. WCF supports the full range of WS-* Web services protocols, which support these features in an interoperable way. In this talk, you’ll learn about WCF support for secure, reliable, transacted messaging. Download the slides! Watch this talk!

Extending WCF

In case you need to build custom functionality on top of WCF, we expose a powerful extensibility model known as the Channel Model. You can use the Channel Model to implement custom communication protocols and transports, which can be useful in everything from implementing custom SOAP protocols to integrating with legacy systems that don’t support Web services.

Yasser Shohoud, a Program Manager on the WCF team, is writing a book about the WCF Channel Model, with guidance for custom channel writers. He's allowed us to publish the first few chapters here:

» Chapter 1 - Introducing WCF Channels

» Chapter 2 - a Channel State Machine

For more information, take a look at the Custom Channels Resources Page. Enjoy!

Windows Communication Foundation Blogs:

Many members of the Windows Communication Foundation team blog about WCF. Here are just a few of their blogs:
	Ami Vora  Andy Milligan  Clemens Vasters  Craig McMurtry  Don Box  Doug Purdy  Ed Pinto  Jorgen Thelin  Kenny Wolf  Kirill Gavrylyuk  Mark Fussell  Mike Vernal  Nicholas Allen  Omri Gazitt  Ralph Squillace  Richard Turner  Shy Cohen  Sowmy Srinivasan  Steve Maine  Yasser Shohoud

Meet the team

Are you curious about the people behind the Windows Communication Foundation? Meet a few members of the product group! In addition to the MSDNTv and Channel 9 shows above, Don Box, an architect on the team, takes you on a whirlwind tour of the product group, and Angela Mills, Group Program Manager of WCF, talks about the position of women in technology on Channel9.

Remember "Indigo"?

Yes, WCF is the technology previously known as "Indigo", and sometimes it's hard for us on the WCF team to let go. In fact, some of us like to use old "Indigo" images as wallpaper, and now you can too.



The thumbnail above links to a hi-res (2MB) version which makes for some nice wallpaper.

Other Websites

You can find even more information on WCF around the Internet:
	» The MSDN Developer Center for the Windows Communication Foundation » The MSDN Web Services Developer Center » The WinFX Developer Center » The Windows Vista Developer Center » WindowsWorkflow.net » The February WinFX CTP Online Documentation » Changes from the January CTP to the February CTP » Today's MSN search for WCF