This is the start of a long series on channel development. Some of the material in the series is going to duplicate topics that I've written about in the past. That's ok. The goal of the series is to have a walkthrough that is self-contained and in one place that is easy to read through. Many of those older articles are for older versions of WCF and may differ slightly from what was shipped in the final version. Everything in this series is going to talk about the V1 version of WCF. As an added bonus, everything here should still be true in the next version of WCF and future versions after that. This is the advantage of having to live with backwards compatibility. Future versions of WCF might make it easier to do the things that I talk about, but the methods in this series should continue to work forever.

In the end, it should be possible to stitch the articles in this series together into one massive blob of text although I probably won't go that far.

Here's what the series is going to cover:

1. Background on the role of channels
2. WCF and the channel model architecture
3. Basic walkthrough of writing channels
4. Writing a simple protocol channel
5. Advanced walkthrough of writing channels
6. Writing a simple transport channel
7. Specialty topics for writing channels

The earlier topics consist of 4 or 5 articles each. The later topics consist of around 10 articles each. As you can see, this is going to be a really long series in total. To counter that, I'm not going to run articles in this series all 5 days a week. You will probably get 3 articles of this series per week mixed in with other unconnected topics.

Here are the four articles in topic #1:

1. The Introduction (that's this article you're reading now)
2. When to Write a Channel
3. Protocol Channels
4. Transport Channels

I'm not going to do an introduction article for each topic so topic #2 starts directly in the fifth article.

Next time: When to Write a Channel