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Leadtools.Services.DataContracts Introduction (WCF)

The LEADTOOLS WCF offering includes services for file loading and saving, image processing, document image processing and clean-up, OCR and barcode detection, reading and writing. These new services will be invaluable to developers creating enterprise level client/server applications.

Built on top of the .NET Framework, the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was designed to unify Web Service technologies into a single service-oriented architecture (SOA). Web Services are APIs that are hosted on a remote computer (although, with WCF it can actually be hosted locally as well!). Services are hosted remotely and are accessed by adding a Web Reference (or Service Reference) to the URL of the service, (instead of adding a reference to a local .NET DLL to your project). Web Services are usually stateless, meaning that the service is called, does something and then returns, and does not store or remember anything about the call.  All the data necessary for the process is passed in the call.

Using WCF, programmers develop services based on the contract requirements. Applications save and load data as transacted web services. Protocol requirements, etc. are determined when the application is deployed.   

Key Features:

• Provides a unified framework for building service-oriented imaging applications utilizing transacted Web services.
• Single programming model unifies the capabilities of ASMX, WSE, Remoting, COM+ and MSMQ.
• Utilizes SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) for communication between processes, allowing interoperability between LEADTOOLS WCF applications and any other process that communicates via SOAP messages.
• Saves and loads data to disks, databases, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP servers.

The Leadtools.Services.DataContracts namespace contains classes, enumerations, and structures that support saving and loading different types of data using the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) platform. WCF is the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) portion of the .NET 3.0 framework.

System Requirements
Download the required software from Microsoft's download website.

In order to execute the WCF demos, you must have the .NET Framework 2.0 or later installed.

In addition, to run the WCF demos you need:

• Visual Studio 2005

In addition, to re-compile WCF demos you need:

• "Microsoft® Windows® Software Development Kit Update for Windows Vista"

or

• "Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework version 3.5"

* Included with LEADTOOLS Imaging SDK. All others are available in LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro, Document, and Medical Imaging SDKs.