WCF Service

What is the WCF Service

The WCF Service is in place purely to support the Remote application. As such, it's somewhat unfortunately named!

It's basically an aggregator: Pharos Web Remote connects only to the WCF Service, and the WCF Service manages all the tedious work of talking to the DB and various Print Servers, among other things. If you have multiple Remote applications installed, they will all talk to the same WCF Service, and the WCF Service will do all the heavy lifting for all of them.

The WCF Service is considered part of our Principal Services. As such, it's installed on the same machine as the Database Server and License Server. This has several benefits, including simpler configuration and better performance.

The WCF Service is not an optional component: It'll be installed even if the customer is not using Pharos Web Remote.

While it's a web service, it does not require IIS: It's a regular service, just like our Print Server.

Remote communicates with the WCF Server using Microsoft's WCF framework (hence the name, obviously). Communications are secured using SSL, because sensitive user information is being transmitted across the wire. Unlike the EDI Server, you cannot switch off the SSL encryption for the WCF Server.

Because the WCF Service is a utility component that provides no direct functionality to users, it would probably be more useful to simply think of it as a part of the Remote application.