In Service Oriented Applications there are many cases we need an intermediate software between clients and services that bypasses the communication between them. The intermediate software is typically called as a router. Some of the well-known examples where we need a router are protocol mapping (ex. the service is exposed to tcp while the clients expects http), load-balancing (ex. distributing messages to services running in different servers in a round-robin fashion), content-based routing (routing messages to different services based upon the message content) etc.

WCF 4.0 ships with a new service called Routing Service that makes developers life so easy by separating out the routing logic from the clients and services. The nice thing about the Routing Service is it is so easily pluggable and configurable. This Routing Service is available under the new assembly System.ServiceModel.Routing.

In this article I’m going to describe about how we can achieve content-based routing using the WCF Routing Service.

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