What’s New in WCF 4: Channels

  • Article

As we get closer to the release of .Net 4 it becomes easier to talk about exactly what new features we’re planning to provide. This list is a bit different in places from what you’ve seen in the beta 1 release and there’s always a chance that things might change again.

The first part of the list comes from the area of WCF channels.

  • Non-destructive queued receive: the current support for queuing has a choice between transacted messaging and purely best effort messaging. It’s hard to reason about systems that are best effort while it’s hard to achieve high volume and scale while using transactions. We’ve introduced a new queued receive pattern that is amenable to having multiple consumers work off of a single queue while retaining the ability to do transactional processing in your application.
  • Extended protection of secure channels: extended protection is a new mechanism in Windows for binding one security system, such as an SSL stream, to another security system, such as Kerberos or HTTP authentication. By associating the two security systems together and ensuring that the association is preserved over time, it becomes harder for an attacker to get a foothold even when they’re able to intercept and modify your network traffic.
  • Simple byte stream encoding: when talking to something other than a web service you often need to be able to directly influence the stream of bytes that is being exchanged with the network transport. The byte stream encoder is a low overhead way of enabling your application to work with messages that are essentially binary objects.
  • Automatic HTTP client decompression: compression is an approach for reducing the amount of network traffic in exchange for spending more CPU time on the client and server. Many web servers have support for compression modules but the client and server first need to agree to exchange data in a compressed format. We’ve made that easier when using HTTP by allowing the client to automatically negotiate using gzip or deflate compressed streams and then automatically decompress them.