Difference between wcf and azure appfabric service bus?

Question

What is the difference between appfabric service bus and WCF?

Is service bus an alternative to wcf on azure?

Does the service bus provide all functions like wcf?

when to use the service bus and when to use wcf in the azure application?

Please help me....

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

The service bus does not provide the services themselves, but instead provides the ability to connect to services - for example, routing, scalability, security, etc.

This way you usually record your services in WCF and then you can provide the ability to connect to these services using the bus.

This article provides a good introduction to the service bus - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd569756.aspx

Answer 2

You do not need to move away from WCF. However, imagine your application sitting on Windows Azure trying to access the WCF service in your data center (or hosted somewhere). And imagine there is a firewall in the data center that blocks incoming connections. The service bus provides you with the ability to make business calls to this service endpoint. Essentially, each of the two sides connects to the AppFabric service bus endpoint. At this point, they have a connection in which WCF calls can be called.

Linking is similar to what you use today. For example, if you use netTcpBinding, now you use netTcpRelayBinding, since calls are passed through the service bus.

The Windows Azure Training Training Kit has a very good introductory lab to help you understand the basics of the service bus.

Answer 3

ServiceBus is a way of asynchronous communication. Asynchronous communication implies that it is good for multiprocessor programming due to fault tolerance and is not blocked.

WCF is a programming stack used to interact with various environments (for example, Pipes, TCP, HTTP, ServiceBus).

They serve orthogonal purposes. You can use WCF without ServiceBus and ServiceBus without WCF.