Below are the notes I took at the PDC about what’s new in WCF 4.0.
- Default bindings can be created. If no bindings are specified for a service, these bindings are used.
- WCf supports configuration inheritance, so bindings could also be specified at various levels including the machine.config.
- Same applies to behaviors
- Default bindings/behaviors are the bindings/behaviors that have no name or name=”” in the configuration
- Configuration based activation allows services without *.svc files
- ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) is used by WCF
- AppFabric (FKA “Dublin”) stores that data in a Sql Server database for easy retrieval and querying.
- Routing is a completely new feature in WCF which allows service aggregation, protocol bridging and versioning.
- MessageFilters are used to determine destination(s).
- Routing table can be changed at runtime.
- Security can also be bridged.
- Alternate endpoints can be specified for fail-over-safety.
- Discovery is another new feature. It allows for location agility, dynamic / self-healing apps
- Discovery adheres to WS-Discovery standards
- Two mode for discovery: Ad-hoc and managed
- Ad-hoc discovery uses broadcasts
- Managed discovery is like UDDI with a Discovery Proxy.