What’s new in WCF 4.5? let’s start with WCF configuration
This week the new version of .NET was revealed at BUILD – .NET 4.5, and with it also the new version of WCF – WCF 4.5
There are many new features of WCF 4.5, most of them intended to make your life easier when configuring and hosting services, and some other to support features that we all waited for, such as UDP transport support and compressed binary encoding.
So what will be the first new feature to explore? why configuration of course, the thing that troubles all WCF developers.
Ever had the following scenario? – you create a service, expose it through an HTTP or a TCP endpoint without any binding configuration changes, but when you add a service reference to it from a client application, you get a whole bunch of binding configuration which is basically the default configuration.
At first, you delete all of the extra configuration, hoping it won’t be created again when you update the service reference (yeah, right), but after a while, you just leave it as it is, giving up in advance.
No more! One of the new features of WCF 4.5 is simplifying the generated configuration file in clients. From now on, the generated configuration will only include non-default binding configuration.
For example, this is the configuration resulted when adding a service reference to a service that uses wsHttpBinding:
This is the same configuration generated in .NET 4.5:
One more step to ease to process of configuring clients and services.
This is just the first of a series of posts I will publish on the new features of WCF 4.5, so stay tuned. Follow me on Twitter (@IdoFlatow) to get updates as soon as a new posts are published.
The RTM of .NET 4.5 is still to come, and I assume many of you are still adjusting to WCF 4. If you want to learn more about the new features of WCF 4, come to my session at Visual Studio Live! 2011 in Redmond (October 17-21).
Also, if you are an MCT and reside in the US, come hear my session about WCF 4 at the MCT 2011 North-America Summit that will be held in San-Francisco (October 19-21).