Advanced Dotnet Tutorial: How to create a WCF service without Visual Studio

WCF is the first step in building a truly service oriented application for you. It is the most important when working with distributed architecture.Visual Studio is capable of creating its own configuration settings that helps in developing our application with ease. But what if you don’t have Visual Studio? Here is the details to implement one of the most basic WCF service without using Visual Studio and how to interact with the service. Lets do it step by step:

Server Side

Steps to create the Service definition (Contract):

Open Notepad and add namespace System and System.ServiceModel. We need ServiceModel to specify a WCF service
For WCF service we need to create an interface which will act as a proxy to the client. From the client, we need to replicate the proxy object and build the same interface again. After we declare the Interface we mark the Interface with ServiceContract, and the method to be exposed to outside using OperationContract.
Next we create a concrete class for the same to define the class implementing the interface.

So our server is Ready.

[ServiceContract]
public interface IOperationSimpleWCF
{
    [OperationContract]
    string MySimpleMethod(string inputText);
}

public class OperationSampleWCF : IOperationSimpleWCF
{
    public string MySimpleMethod(string inputText)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Message Received : {0}", inputText);
        Console.WriteLine(OperationContext.Current.RequestContext.RequestMessage.ToString());
        return string.Format("Message from Server {0}", inputText);
    }
}