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Asked: 2026-05-30T18:51:19+00:00

I have been researching whether or not to use WCF for a new project

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I have been researching whether or not to use WCF for a new project we are going to be working on.

Basically the only reason which will prevent us from using it is the new project must be able to communicate with a legacy server which talks via .Net’s TcpClient class with binary messages.

I am wondering if I can write a custom binding perhaps to send and receive messages from the server. I have managed to find that I can write custom bindings and encodings. But I am not sure if I can read messages as bytes and not soap messages.

One possible solution I thought of is to write a custom encoding which will transform the bytes into soap messages and vice versa. But I have not checked up on this or thought it through much.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Jason,
    I’d suggest (not sure if this is an answer but I can’t post comments, sorry),
    you rather go with either a full sockets or a full WCF solution (meaning both client and the server).
    Given you have a legacy server with via sockets – it’s much easier to make a sockets client with some custom-protocol you have, and parsing, basic error handling etc.
    …and you’ll get it to be faster too (not sure what’s the purpose, nature of the app and communication you’re having with the server, or do you need some other WCF features etc.).
    See this thread which is more or less your case…
    WCF TCP client with Java Socket server on custom XML messages

    …basically, you’d need to write a transport channel – which would again pretty much have to support everything that you’d need it to do for a ‘sockets-only’ client + extra work and layers.
    That normally only makes sense if you’re
    a) going to reuse that for later on development, so e.g. you could just plug-in that solution for different servers or if you have many developers and large code base etc. (if you don’t, making a sockets solution a separate lib and reusing is still easier) or
    b) or you need some specific feature that ain’t easily reproducible ‘by hand and sockets’ – still to support any of that you’d have to wrap it up pretty thoroughly anyway, or…
    c) some 3rd party lib – that I’m not aware of for such cases (usually this falls into a ‘too custom’ work),
    hope this helps some

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