Technology in Spotlight

Windows Communications Foundations

Windows Communication Foundation (code-named "Indigo") is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems. It is a new breed of communications infrastructure built around the Web services architecture. Advanced Web services support in Windows Communication Foundation provides secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability.

Windows Communication Foundation is Microsoft infrastructure for Service Oriented architecture and unifies a broad array of distributed systems capabilities in a composable and extensible architecture, spanning transports, security systems, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies, and hosting models.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is the last generation of service oriented technologies for development. It provides all the latest means to help developers build service oriented applications. The result of service oriented design is a distributed system which runs between services and clients.


Advantages

Windows Communication Foundation has some important enhancements in comparison with preceding technologies.

It merges all older separate technologies in one place and allows you to do things easier.
It has rich communication capabilities.
It comes with many powerful and ready to use enterprise features.
It can be integrated with other technologies and has great interoperability.

KalSoft’s Research and Development Group has worked on and utilized WCF services in some of their applications. WCF has rich and advanced built in features for handling transactions as compared to web services. Moreover Web Services focuses on solving interoperability problem while WCF has expanded the transport which has further solved the much broader communications problem.

Windows Communication Foundation is being implemented in Bank of Punjab (BOP), for handling their distributed transactions in real time online distributed environment. BOP has 266 branches, each having its own database to perform transactions. In order to facilitate web Service atomic transactions and handle distributed transactions, our consultants chose WCF. WCF will manage bank reconciliation effectively, ensure reliability and successful delivery. Furthermore failed transactions will be rolled back via WCF, thus enhancing recovery mechanism.