Basic WCF/Web Service Question

[maikeru-sama]

1) Is WCF a replacement for Web Services? I was just reading it seems to indicate that WCF is now kind of a 'universal' umbrella for communication between two or more systems.

2) Say I create a Interface/Class and have a Method that returns an int value. When a program written in say, Java or C++ consumes the Web Service or WCF method, how do these different languages know how to handle a 'C#' int? I am going to assume that is handled at the OS level?

Instead of just learning this technology by looking at samples on the Internet and books, I want to have a solid understanding of theories behind them.

[chris128]

1) I believe so yes. I've never used Web Services but I have used WCF and seen references to web services and from what I can tell WCF is basically the new 'version' of web services. I would not say that WCF is a universal umrella for any kind of communication between two programs though, as WCF is a specific way of communicating between two programs (though it can use several different transports such as HTTP, TCP/IP, Named Pipes, etc)

2) I'm not sure on that one I'm afraid

[maikeru-sama]

Chris, let me clarify. When I say 'an umbrella', I meant that the book stated that for ".Net Remoting", "MSMQ" etc etc, you would have to use different technologies and they said WCF allows you to do all of this with 1 tool.

[chris128]

Ah right well then yeah you are correct in that case. Basically the idea with WCF is that you worry about the actual implementation of your methods, and WCF takes care of actually sending/receiving the data to/from the other program - if you want it to send the data via HTTP/HTTPS instead of TCP/IP then its just a case of changing a value in a config file