title: WCF net.tcp bindings, message formats and security questions
body: <p>sorry for the stupid questions but there are just some things about WCF I cant get my head around. Would be greatful for some advice on the following....</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>At a very basic level is it correct that WCF uses either Binary (Net.Tcp), HTTP or MSMQ to transfer my message on the wire?</p></li>
  <li><p>However is it true that in all cases, regardless of how the data is transferred the message itself in in the SOAP format with headers and a body? So its a sort of XML message that is transmitted in either HTTP/S or in a binary format.</p></li>
  <li><p>Is Net.Tcp a good choice for my client server app - its similar to a messenger app in that the clients are all remote users on the other side of the firewall to my server. Most things I am reading are telling to use WS* and HTTP.</p></li>
  <li><p>Is Net.Tcp secured by standard and without certificates? - that is - people cannot listen on the wire and decode the data thats going to and from.</p></li>
  <li><p>Is it possible to send a username and password using net.tcp and without an installed certificate?</p></li>
  <li><p>If so I presume I can hook this up to my membership provider and authenticate access to each method on my service contract implementation.</p></li>
  <li><p>I presume that with username and password security, the proxy is initialised with the username and password and that this information is is sent with every request.</p></li>
  <li><p>Then my membership provider will be invoked for each method call and do whatever it needs to do to get the authorisation for the method.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Sorry for the dump of questions but would be great to know if Im thinking the right way about how WCF works.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>