In the previous chapters, we covered a lot of interesting topics, such as:
How layered and tiered architectures work
How to implement an n-tier architecture in our web applications
How to use the ASP.NET MVC framework to completely de-couple our UI from the code logic and make our GUI more unit-test friendly
How to use design patterns to write better and more robust code
In this chapter, we will learn about another famous architecture, known as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). We will also see how we can implement SOA using the latest Microsoft programming framework for communication between inter-connected systems, known as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). This chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of either SOA or WCF, but is intended to give developers a general idea of SOA-based architectures, and where WCF fits in to this.
This chapter covers the following topics:
Understanding application size, scope and granularity
What is SOA
Why we need...