WCF Endpoints

WCF Service is a program that exposes a collection of Endpoints. Each Endpoint is a portal for communicating with the outside applications and services. All the WCF communications take place through end points

Endpoint consists of:

1) Contract - It is a set of operations that are provided by the service. It is usually the name of the interface which defines the WCF service and gives the information about what all methods and operations are exposed to the outside applications. Each operation can interact in one of the following way - one-way, duplex and request/reply.

2) Address - This is the address of the WCF service being constructed. Through means of this URL the other applications can access the WCF operations.

3) Binding - Binding describes how client will communicate with service. The following table gives some list of protocols supported by WCF binding.

Binding	Description
BasicHttpBinding	Basic Web service communication. No security by default
WSHttpBinding	Web services with WS-* support. Supports transactions
WSDualHttpBinding	Web services with duplex contract and transaction support
WSFederationHttpBinding	Web services with federated security. Supports transactions
MsmqIntegrationBinding	Communication directly with MSMQ applications. Supports transactions
NetMsmqBinding	Communication between WCF applications by using queuing. Supports transactions
NetNamedPipeBinding	Communication between WCF applications on same computer. Supports duplex contracts and transactions
NetPeerTcpBinding	Communication between computers across peer-to-peer services. Supports duplex contracts
NetTcpBinding	Communication between WCF applications across computers. Supports duplex contracts and transactions

Note: This is not my original work. Have blogged it here just for my future reference and of course if someone wants to use it.

This content has been taken from: http://www.wcftutorial.net/EndPoint.aspx