Does WCF raise the bar or just the complexity level? [closed]

Answer 1

I find that is a pain; in that I have .NET at both ends, have the same "contract" dlls loaded at both ends etc. But then I have to mess about with a lot of details like "KnownType" attributes.

WCF also defaults to only letting 1 or 2 clients connect to a service until you change lots of configuration. Changing the config from code is not easy, shipping lots of comfig files is not an option, as it is too hard to merge our changes into any changes a customer may have made at the time of an upgrade (also we don't want customers playing with WCF settings!)

.NET remoting tended to just work most of the time.

I think trying to pretend that .NET to .NET object based communications is the same as sending bit so of Text (xml) to an unknown system, was a step too far.

(The few times we have used WCF to talk to a Java system, we found that the XSD that the java system gave out did not match what XML it wanted anyway, so had to hand-code a lot of the XML mappings.)

Answer 2

WCF should not be thought of as a replacement for ASMX. Judging at how it is positioned and how it is being used internally by Microsoft, it is really a fundamental architecture piece that is used for any type of cross-boundary communication.

Answer 3

The difficult things I find with WCF is managing the configurations for clients and servers, and troubleshooting the not so nice faulted state exceptions.

It would be great if anyone had any shortcuts or tips for those.

Answer 4

If you're using VS2008 and create a WCF project then you automatically get a test harness when you hit run/debug and you can add a reference without having to use svcutil.

Answer 5

My initial thoughts of WCF were exactly the same! Here are some solutions:

1. Program your own proxy/client layer utilising generics (see classes ClientBase, Binding). I've found this easy to get working, but hard to perfect.
2. Use a third party implementation of 1 (SoftwareIsHardwork is my current favourite)

Answer 6

I believe that WCF really advances ASMX web services implementation in many ways. First of all it provides a very nice layered object model that helps hide the intrinsic complexity of distributed applications. Secondly you can have more than request-replay messaging patterns, including asynchronous notifications from server to client (impossible with pure HTTP), and thirdly abstracting away the underlying transport protocol from XML messaging and thus elegantly supporting HTTP, HTTPS, TCP and other. Backward compatibility with "1-st generation" web services is also a plus. WCF uses XML standard as the internal representation format. This could be perceived as advantage or disadvantage, especially with the growing popularity "fat-free alternatives to XML" like JSON.