SAP Enterprise Services and Microsoft .NET 3.0 – Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

SAP currently published a whitepaper about Consuming Enterprise Services in .NET 3.0. At the first look you will ask where WCF is used in this example and what are the advantages or using WCF. What exactly is WCF? WCF of the Windows Communication Foundation is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems. It is a new breed of communications infrastructure built around the Web services architecture. Advanced Web services support in Windows Communication Foundation provides secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability. The service-oriented programming model of Windows Communication Foundation is built on the Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework and simplifies development of connected systems. Windows Communication Foundation unifies a broad array of distributed systems capabilities in a composable and extensible architecture, spanning transports, security systems, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies, and hosting models. Windows Communication Foundation will be available for Windows Vista™ as well as for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

By using the ServiceModel Metadata Utility Tool (Svcutil) the author of the whitepaper created a WCF client based on the WSDL exported from the SAP system. The detailed description of the syntax for Svcutil can be found on https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa751905.aspx. Here you can also find a Getting started Tutorial, which explains WCF and a couple of sample applications using WCF. WCF can also be used for .NET clients connecting to the Web Services the SAP system offers; the access is not restricted to Enterprise Services. So if you plan to do some tests all you need is a SAP system based on Web Application Server 6.40 of higher, in case you don’t have such a system in your landscape you can also use the NetWeaver Sneak Preview ABAP Edition which can be found on sdn.sap.com.

- Juergen