Introduction to WCF LOB Adapter SDK
What is WCF LOB Adapter SDK?
The WCF LOB Adapter SDK is targeted at developers that are interested in exposing their line-of-business (LOB) systems for integration purposes to any .NET integration broker/integration application. For purposes of this discussion a LOB system may be defined as a metadata rich back end systems whose functionality is too rich and dynamic to be captured in traditional static Web Service Description Language (WSDL) contracts. This SDK enables development of metadata driven, host-agnostic adapters i.e. independent of consuming app, which helps you avoid duplication of effort in writing adapters
How does WCF LOB Adapter differ from a WCF Service?
An adapter may be conceptually thought of as an “uber service” atop an LOB system that will let you carve out and compose a contract that is most relevant to your application and still retain all the advantages of a traditional service like loose coupling and strong typing.
Given all these choices, when would a developer write a WCF LOB Adapter or a WCF Service or a WCF Channel?
If the target system that you are trying to integrate with is not metadata aware and your intent is to simply transport bits to the target system, then you write a WCF transport channel using the WCF Channel Model framework directly. Examples of such systems include MSMQ, ftp etc.
If the target system is metadata aware but its metadata/functionality is easily captured in a static contract (or a manageable set of contracts) then it is best to write a traditional WCF service wrapper around the system native calls. E.g. a proprietary Math calculator program written in FORTRAN.
If the target system’s functionality is large and dynamic, and you want to be able to expose the entire gamut of functionality for integration, creating an adapter to the WCF Adapter SDK is your best bet. Examples of such systems include SAP, databases, etc.
· Note: this is the point of view for C. Venkatesh, Principal Group Manager of WCF LOB Adapter SDK at Microsoft
· With My Little Experience, WCF LOB Adapters work in highly performance with the last two cases.
Link to download WCF LOB Adapter SDK:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=56278FDE-B708-469C-987E-DED9C6C5E580&displaylang=en
Basic Reference : http://blogs.msdn.com/sonuarora/
Next: How to add new WCF LOB Adapter to your .NET solution?
Later: With WCF LOB Adapters, Less Code … More Magic