To answer a question I've heard a couple times now, WCF is almost entirely written in C#.  And, almost every line of that C# is managed, type-safe, and verifiable.  There's very little in WCF that you can't do with just the Base Class Libraries in the 2.0 .NET Framework.  It takes millions of lines of code to do it all though, so I do hope that you find using WCF an attractive proposition compared to providing the equivalent support yourself.

Pretty much all of the code that I'll be posting to this blog will be in C# as well.  That isn't to suggest that we've made it to difficult to use WCF from other languages.  In fact, a lot of interesting things can be done with just the XML configuration files, which are totally independent of the language you use for your application.  In the future, Microsoft may have specialized languages for writing distributed applications that blow C# out of the water.  However, the language of choice today for writing highly-performant network applications using WCF is probably going to be C#.  You can use MC++, VB.NET, or your other favorite language, but it might not be as fun and easy.

Special note: this advice applies even if you have Visual Basic Professional.

This is an interruption of your regularly scheduled post to take a little breather from the current series and evenly finish off the week.  I've got a few of these lighter posts to sprinkle in now and then when there's some free time.  We'll be back to slicing our WCF example tomorrow and conclude the series on Friday.