What is Windows Communication Foundation?

I've been designing .NET applications using ASP.NET Web Services since 2004. Web Services is the great tool for building service-oriented architecture (SOA) systems and connecting applications in different environments. But, it does not solve some other important problems and you need to use another tools e.g. .NET Remoting, Enterprise Services, Web Services Enhancements (WSE), System.Messaging, System.Net.

With WCF, the perfect solution is at hand:



Here’s how WCF addresses common technical requirements:
-  Because WCF can communicate using Web services, interoperability with other platforms that also support SOAP, such as Java EE application servers, is straightforward.
-  To allow optimal performance when both parties in a communication are built on WCF, the wire encoding used in this case is an optimized binary version of SOAP. Messages still conform to the data structure of a SOAP message, referred to as its Infoset, but their encoding uses a binary representation of that Infoset rather than the standard angle-brackets-and-text format of XML.
-  Managing object lifetimes, defining distributed transactions, and other aspects of Enterprise Services are now provided by WCF. They are available to any WCF-based application, which means that third  party applications can use them with any of the other applications with which it communicates.
-  Because it supports a large set of the WS-* specifications, WCF helps provide reliability, security, and transactions when communicating with any platform that also supports these specifications.
-  WCF’s option for queued messaging, built on MSMQ, allows applications to use persistent queuing without needing to use another set of application programming interfaces.
-  The version of WCF in the .NET Framework 3.5 has built-in support for creating RESTful clients and services.

Read more here: Introducing Windows Communication Foundation
Or MSDN WCF