WCF 4.0 is the framework to use to build services that are flexible with regard to transport, encoding, and various protocols. This was precisely what WCF 4.0 was designed for and what it does extremely well. WCF enables me to write service code and contracts which can then be exposed over various bindings (transport, security, etc.). That hasn’t changed and continues to be the case. If you are building a service in your organization and plan to support multiple protocols, or simply use protocols other than HTTP (tcp, name pipes, udp, etc.) then WCF 4.0 continues to be your choice. A service endpoint can be part of a continuously available service hosted by IIS, or it can be a service hosted in an application. An endpoint can be a client of a service that requests data from a service endpoint. The messages can be as simple as a single character or word sent as XML, or as complex as a stream of binary data.