Using NetTcpBinding to communicate with non-WCF clients

Question

As far as I know, NetTcpBinding can only be used for WCF to WCF communication. Since this binding does use several of WS-* protocols, I'm a bit puzzled why it can't also be used to  for communication with non-WCF clients??

thank you

Answer 1

The protocols used in the message are WS-* protocols, but how the message is encoded (the XML infoset, the framing used in the TCP communication, some dictionaries used to compress the message) are not.

The specification for the protocols used by the NetTcpBinding are public (under http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216513(v=PROT.10).aspx there are links for most protocols used by it, including http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc219293(PROT.10).aspx, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc219175(v=PROT.10).aspx, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc219190(v=PROT.10).aspx, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc219210(v=PROT.10).aspx, etc.), so in theory anyone could implement them.

However, I'm not aware of any other SOAP stacks which implement those protocols so they're essentially limited to WCF-WCF communication.

Answer 2

thank you very much