WCF and the Line-of-Business Adapter SDK

Microsoft intended WCF to be a generalized communication framework - the programming framework that developers would use to communicate with anything. Around the initial release of WCF, in December 2006, people thought of it as a web services thang. It ain't. It's WS-* checkbox compliant, for sure. (As noted here previously, the list of open standard protocols supported in WCF is long, and includes: HTTP1.1, XML, SOAP1.1, SOAP1.2, WS-Addressing, XOP, MTOM, WS-Security (including x.509, Kerberos, and SAML 1.1 token profiles), WS-Policy, WS-Trust, WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-SecureConversation, WSDL 1.1, WS-MetadataExchange, WS-Transfer.) But WCF is more than WS-*. WCF also includes support for optimized binary transports, for efficiency and performance, and, in .NET 3.5 (coming soon), support for non-WS standard protocols like JSON and RSS.

But we also recognize that there are non-standard communications protocols out there, that ain't going away. Take for example the protocols used by SAP or any database. To address the need to connect to those sorts of things, using the same generalized communication framework, in August we released the WCF LOB Adapter SDK. That's a mouthful! (TMA = Too Many Acronyms)

This SDK for Windows Communication Foundation provides the tools to quickly develop adapters to business applications, including packaged and custom apps in your enterprise. Adapters built using this SDK can be consumed by any .NET application, including apps running in Microsoft’s BizTalk, SQL, and SharePoint Servers, or your own custom .NET applications.

Download the SDK here. See an educational video here. Learn more here.

Go forth and interop!