In this chapter, we learned that Windows Communication Foundation is a broad and powerful framework for designing, building, hosting, and consuming services. WCF unifies the many distributed application technologies in the Microsoft platform under a single programming model. The service developer is now freed from programming to the constraints of a given transport and can instead focus on building robust services that take advantage of the latest industry standards for security, transactions, stateful sessions, and more.

The importance of WCF to BizTalk Server 2013 cannot be understated. In the next chapter, we will look at how to both expose and consume powerful WCF services from the BizTalk Server engine.