What’s New in WCF 4: More on Services and Configuration

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 third part of the list covers some of the new features for service configuration. I haven’t mentioned some of the larger changes for simplified configuration and standard endpoints because those are already a part of the official beta 1 list.

- Short type name support: many of the configuration extensions require registering a CLR type for the extension object. We generally recommend using fully qualified type names, but this is not always practical during development. Several of the extension elements for WCF configuration now recognize and attempt to resolve short type names.

Location tag for service files: there is a standard ASP.NET configuration feature that allows a location element to describe configuration specific to a part of the application. With ASMX it was possible to use that location element with a path to the ASMX file. We’ve similarly enabled the use of location elements with SVC files.  

• Channel factories with custom configuration: we’ve added new channel factory subclasses that support passing in your own instance of a configuration object. This allows you to build configuration objects from a source other than the application configuration without having to construct the proxy objects entirely by hand.