.NET Remoting vs. Web Services vs. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

Question

Anyone willing to help me out with pros/cons on .NET Remoting, Web Services, and WCF? I have worked a bit with .NET Remoting and Web Services and I am architecting a new ASP.NE

Answer 1

Good question! Like yourself I've not looked at WCF before and wonder whether it render web services more or less obsolete?

On your point about Linq2SQL - given that this is a spanky new app and you're probably going to be maintaining the codebase for a good few years - personally (and at the risk of being downvoted for this - but remember it's a valid point of view!) I'd be inclined to look at the Entity Framework.

I am aware of it's faults, the biggest for me being that it is too tightly coupled to the DAL - therefore it cannot be unit tested easily (believe me, this is a BIG problem for me, although I do have a gut feeling there is a work-around to achieve this).

However, my personal opinion is that MS are just not going to let this technology fall by the wayside, and I'd have to take into consideration the rumours it will REPLACE L2S. The flipside of that is that L2S is a much more mature tech and a safer bet.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I believe Dan Simmons when he says they are working on delivering the EF (eventually) as a completely persistent-ignorant architecture - http://blogs.msdn.com/dsimmons/pages/ef-faq-entity-classes.aspx#_Does_Entity_Framework