Windows Communication Foundation looms as an important step forward for Microsoft-style development. WCF can provide an infrastructure for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). It is based on a Service Model focused on the job of communicating, and uses a class framework called the Channel Layer (comprising classes in the System.Service.Model.Channel namespace. Often running alongside SOA is WSDL, the Web Services Description Language uses XML to describe data. It is intended to provide a unified approach to the task of connecting diverse systems.
Authors Craig McMurtry, Marc Mercuri, and Nigel Watling have written one of the most comprehensive overviews about WCF. In the book chapter excerpt provided here, the authors discuss XMLFormatter and XMLSerializer. A perusal of various developer forums discloses that these are among the topic many developers need to grapple with as they venture into Web Services.
In this chapter, entitled “Data Representation,” the authors describe how data is sent from a Windows Communication Foundation client to a service, is serialized to XML within the client, and received from clients by Windows Communication Foundation, and so on. Two XML serializers that the Windows Communication Foundation can use to accomplish the serialization to XML and deserialization from XML are described. One is the XmlSerializer class that has been a part of the .NET Framework class library from the outset. The other is the XmlFormatter class that is new with the WCF. These are compared and contrasted. All hands on deck!