Is WCF end of life? - Microsoft Q&A (2024)

FAQs

Is WCF end of life? - Microsoft Q&A? ›

Just like Web Forms and other . NET Framework technologies, your WCF applications will continue to work for a long time. In fact, WCF will likely work for the next two decades thanks to . NET Framework being considered part of the windows operating system.

Due to some breaking changes, we're extending the end of support date for WCF Client 4.10 until November 12, 2024.

gRPC is a comprehensive RPC solution. It works consistently across multiple languages and platforms. It also provides excellent tooling, with much of the boilerplate code automatically generated. Like WCF, gRPC automatically generates messages and a strongly typed client.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. Using WCF, you can send data as asynchronous messages from one service endpoint to another. A service endpoint can be part of a continuously available service hosted by IIS, or it can be a service hosted in an application.

The WCF Web Service Reference tool is applicable only to C# . NET Core and . NET Standard projects, including ASP.NET Core Web apps. Using the ASP.NET Core Web Application project template as an example, this article walks you through adding a WCF service reference to the project.

You can use gRPC for hosting web services inside . NET core application. gRPC is a high performance, open source RPC framework initially developed by Google. The framework is based on a client-server model of remote procedure calls.

Web API is the best option for writing mobile devices and device-oriented services. WEB API is easier to learn, requiring less configuration than WCF. If there is a service written in WCF at your workplace (which is very likely) you need to know WCF to accompany it.

WCF is used for SOAP-based service development, whereas Web API is utilized for both SOAP-based and RESTful service development. WCF does not provide support for MVC functionalities, although Web API does. WCF supports HTTP, UDP, and custom transport protocols, whereas Web API only supports HTTP.

The WCF client will be updated with the release of CoreWCF to ensure seamless coordination. Starting with the 6.0 release, the WCF client package no longer supports . NET Standard 2.0 and is exclusively for . NET 6.0 and later.

NET5+ that didn't natively support WCF. It aimed to bring features and capabilities that would allow developers to build and consume SOAP-based services using the WCF programming model. Once a community-driven project introduced in 2019, Microsoft began supporting it on it's release of 1.0 in April 2022.

Is WCF going away? ›

Windows Communication Framework (WCF) may be deprecated in . NET 5/6+, but it doesn't mean your applications are going to be left out in the cold. Just like Web Forms and other . NET Framework technologies, your WCF applications will continue to work for a long time.

WCF is for service-oriented software solutions, and WPF is for developing the UI of a . NET app. In addition, both technologies can be used together. It can help you enhance the interface as well as the data-sharing capabilities of your enterprise-grade software.

You can use WCF to build RESTful services in . NET. REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architecture paradigm that conforms to the REST architecture principles. The REST architecture is based on the concept of resources: It uses resources to represent the state and functionality of an application.

Need for WCF

WCF unified all these into a single service development framework with the following goals: Provide a unified programming model for building services across transport protocols like HTTP, TCP, Named Pipes etc. Enable services to expose multiple endpoints and bindings simultaneously.

gRPC as an alternative to WCF

gRPC is a modern RPC framework that is a popular alternative to WCF. gRPC is built on top of HTTP/2, which provides a number of advantages over WCF, including: Performance: gRPC is much more efficient than WCF, especially for long-running connections.

Windows Communication Framework (WCF) may be deprecated in . NET 5/6+, but it doesn't mean your applications are going to be left out in the cold. Just like Web Forms and other . NET Framework technologies, your WCF applications will continue to work for a long time.

Starting with the 6.0 release, the WCF client package no longer supports . NET Standard 2.0 and is exclusively for . NET 6.0 and later. This change enables the use of newer functionality available in .

Azure Relay takes existing WCF web services and makes those services securely accessible to solutions that are outside the corporate perimeter without requiring intrusive changes to the corporate network infrastructure.