What do you mean by endpoints in WCF?
All communication with a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service occurs through the endpoints of the service. Endpoints provide clients access to the functionality offered by a WCF service. We expose endpoints for making our service to be consumed.
Each endpoint consists of four properties:
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Address: The address uniquely identifies the endpoint and tells potential consumers of the service where it is located. We mainly use URL as address.
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Binding: The binding specifies how to communicate with the endpoint like transport protocol, encoding for messages and necessary security requirements. WCF uses by default wsHttp binding.
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Contracts: The contract outlines what functionality the endpoint exposes to the client.There are many contracts like service, operation, data, fault and message contracts. A contract specifies:
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What operations can be called by a client.
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The form of the message.
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The type of input parameters or data required to call the operation.
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What type of processing or response message the client can expect.
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Behaviors: We can use endpoint behaviors to customize the local behavior of the service endpoint. Endpoint behaviors achieve this by participating in the process of building a WCFruntime.
what is the difference between web service and a web application?
Web Application:Any application which we can run in our web browser is a web application.
Web Service:A web service is an Application Program Interface (API) that runs on the server, which provide data to the client over http through a standardized messaging system. (XML, JSON, etc…).