wcf

A guide to Windows Communication Foundation, a .NET framework for services that commonly use SOAP, formal contracts, and several network transports. It covers service and client configuration as well as moving services to newer HTTP-based APIs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when building or reviewing WCF services and clients, configuring bindings and contracts, checking interoperability, or planning an endpoint-by-endpoint migration.
Why use it?
It helps developers decide whether an existing WCF service should stay as it is or be migrated, without losing required security, transport, transaction, or client compatibility behavior.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/managedcode/dotnet-skills/wcf
Any agent
npx skills add managedcode/dotnet-skills --skill wcf
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/managedcode/dotnet-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 120 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 479 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00120 $0.00479
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.00239
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00096
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00048

Measured 2d ago against content hash 5a16c7c0052e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

wcf scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

catalog/Frameworks/WCF/skills/wcf/SKILL.md · 40 lines

What it actually says

Windows Communication Foundation

Trigger On

  • working on WCF services, bindings, or clients
  • deciding whether a service should stay WCF or move to modern HTTP APIs
  • reviewing transport, security, or interoperability settings

Workflow

  1. Use WCF where SOAP, WS-* features, or multi-transport service requirements are real; do not rewrite those needs into HTTP-only guidance by accident.
  2. Keep contracts, bindings, behaviors, and hosting configuration explicit because WCF complexity compounds through configuration indirection.
  3. For new REST-style services, prefer modern ASP.NET Core APIs instead of extending WCF into a shape it is no longer best suited for.
  4. Plan migrations per endpoint and capability: transport, security model, transaction requirements, metadata, and client compatibility.
  5. Validate interoperability and deployment assumptions with the actual client ecosystem, not only local service startup.
  6. When WCF coexists with ASP.NET, be explicit about which runtime behaviors are shared and which are not.

Deliver

  • stable WCF service or client configuration
  • realistic migration guidance to newer stacks where appropriate
  • clear contract and binding ownership

Validate

  • WCF is used for a reason the modern stack does not replace directly
  • binding and security behavior are explicit
  • interop is verified with real consumers

References

  • migration.md - WCF to gRPC/REST/CoreWCF migration paths, decision framework, and endpoint-by-endpoint migration strategy
  • patterns.md - WCF maintenance patterns for configuration, contracts, hosting, security, diagnostics, and client proxy management
Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 40 lines · 120 tokens per session scan A 5a16c7c0052e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

wcf is a skill published in the GitHub repository managedcode/dotnet-skills (477 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 120 tokens to every session and 479 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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