Getting Started Tutorial

The topics contained in this section are intended to give you quick exposure to the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) programming experience.
They are designed to be completed in the order of the list at the bottom of this topic.
Working through this tutorial gives you an introductory understanding of the steps required to create WCF service and client applications.
A service exposes one or more endpoints, each of which exposes one or more service operations.
The endpoint of a service specifies an address where the service can be found, a binding that contains the information that describes how a client must communicate with the service, and a contract that defines the functionality provided by the service to its clients.

After you work through the sequence of topics in this tutorial, you will have a running service, and a client that calls the service.
The first three topics describe how to define a service contract, how to implement the service contract, and how to host the service.
The service that is created is self-hosted within a console application.
Services can also be hosted under Internet Information Services (IIS).
For more information about how to do this, see How to: Host a WCF Service in IIS.
The service is configured in code; however, services can also be configured within a configuration file. For more information about using a configuration file see Configuring Services Using Configuration Files.

The next three topics describe how to
create a client proxy,
configure the client application,
and use the client proxy to call service operation exposed by the service.
Services publish metadata that define the information a client application needs to communicate with the service.
Visual Studio 2012 automates the process of accessing this metadata and uses it to construct and configure the client application for the service.
If you are not using Visual Studio 2012, you can use the ServiceModel Metadata Utility Tool (Svcutil.exe) to construct and configure the client application for the service.
All of the topics in this section assume you are using Visual Studio 2011 as the development environment. If you are using another development environment, ignore the Visual Studio specific instructions.