The Windows Communication Foundation is a set of technologies for building and running connected systems.

The Windows Communication Foundation is a new breed of communications infrastructure built around the Web services architecture. Advanced Web services support in the Windows Communication Foundation provides secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability. The Windows Communication Foundation’s service-oriented programming model is built on the .NET Framework and simplifies development of connected systems. The Windows Communication Foundation unifies a broad array of distributed systems capabilities in an extensible architecture, spanning transports, security systems, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies and hosting models. The Windows Communication Foundation will be an integral capability of Windows Vista and will also be supported on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

Microsoft has also done significant work to integrate the Windows Communication Foundation with existing Microsoft technologies for building distributed systems including COM+, MSMQ, and ASP.NET Web services. Applications built with those existing technologies can now be exposed as services without modification to the application. This infrastructure-level solution greatly assists developers in exposing existing applications as services. The Windows Communication Foundation also provides simple and mechanical mechanisms to migrate applications that use .NET remoting, ASP.NET Web services, and .NET Enterprise Services to natively use the Windows Communication Foundation programming model.