I have just finished reading about WCF – Service Endpoint basics. So what is it?
Endpoint is where consumer contacts with service. To remember about endpoint, just need to remember this: ABC of endpoint, stand for: Address, Binding, and Contract.
- Address: The URL of the service location: http://localhost/SomeService/Service/
- Binding: Define how to access the service, how to communicate with service.
- Contract: Define what service does
There are 2 ways of creating endpoint: by configuration and by code. Should use configuration as best practice. Since you can change it later point of time when the service is deployed without recompile the code.
Creating endpoint using configuration is quite simple. Just create a wcf library project then VS takes care of all stuffs for you 🙂
For services exposed to multiple clients, you can specify more than one endpoints so client can use the one most suitable for them. You add one more endpoint tag in configuration and make sure that the address is unique for each. If the address is the same, then the contract should be different.
Take advantage of baseAddress tag to specify the common part of the address. And again, VS already takes care of that 🙂
The default configuration generated by VS exposes meta data to the client. To turn it off set the httpGetEnabled to false.
I just wrote them down here as a way of learning it, if you do not understand or have any question, please post a comment.
