Native web services – WCF interoperability with native code

There was a lot of effort to make WCF interoperable with almost every web service technology out there… But what about native code?

How can native code call a WCF service? How can native code be exposed as a web service?

Well you could always wrap native code with managed code but this introduced too many introp calls which degrades performance. You could also program against TCP sockets but manually implementing WS* is a nightmare.

Windows 7 brings an answer: wssapi – Windows Web Service API.

with wssapi you can easily create a native proxy to a WCF service. You can also expose your native code using a native service and a native host and create a web service that looks and feels like a WCF service.

To learn more about in I strongly recommend watching the following videos.

1. Native Web services Part1
2. Native Web services Part 2
3. Web Services in native code

wssapi will also support XP Server 2003 and Server 2008.

Enjoy