- A Service Contract describes what the service can do. It defines some properties about the service, and a set of actions called Operation Contracts. Operation Contracts are equivalent to web methods in ASMX, or to operation element in WSDL.
- A service contract is an interface that the WCF tools and infrastructure can convert into a WSDL document, listing the operations for a service as a series of SOAP messages and message responses.
- You provide an implementation of these methods in a class in the service. When a service executes, the WCF runtime creates a channel stack by using the bindings specified in the service configuration file and listens for client requests in the form of one of these messages. The WCF runtime then converts each SOAP message sent by a client application into a method call and invokes the corresponding method in an instance of the class implementing the service. Any data returned by the method is converted back into a SOAP response message and is sent back through the channel stack for transmission to the client application.
- WCF assumes that nothing is exposed by default. So, if you do not specify your class with Data Contract attributes, WCF doesn’t allow serialization to the wire.
Data Contracts
- Service Contracts by default, can handle simple service calls. Calls which can have simple type arguments (build-in types), and which return also simple types values. The problem comes when you want to return a custom type, or accept it as an argument for your service operation. In order to do that, the messaging world, has a concept called Data Contract. Data Contract is the normalization of your custom messaging structures. It defines the members of your operation arguments or return values. In WSDL, the Data Contract is equivalent to the type element.
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