Mono WCF example

Basic example of WCF Services with Mono. WCF is Windows Communication Foundation. Some terminology explained:

• Service - class that does business logic. .NET considers a class a WCF service when inherits from a
• Service Contract - interface annotated with ServiceContract attribute and each exposed method with OperationContract attribute. Those are available in the System.ServiceModel assembly and namespace.
• Host - application that hosts the WCF Service. Typically this is IIS. You can tell IIS "This DLL has a WCF Service - host it for me" and it will. But .NET includes necessary classes for you to host it in another application (like in this repository).
• ServiceHost - .NET class from System.ServiceModel that can start hosting specified services. It's used to run the service in custom applications, like this.
• Binding - The way (protocol) the service is exposed and consumed. E.g. HTTP, TCP, etc. This example runs with HTTP binding. A Binding object is passed to the ServiceHost constructor. In IIS you can configure which binding to use for your service.

Run

• Open the WCF.sln file with either MonoDevelop, Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio.
• Build the solution
• Start the solution

It should start two console applications - client and host. In the client console you can type your name and the service will greet you.

Structure

• Client/ Console application - consumes the service.
• GreeterWcfService/ Class Library - the service itself. Includes business logic + contracts (interfaces) for the service.
• Host/ Console application - hosts the WCF service via HTTP binding.