re: The Future of WCF, Part 1

David Nelson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:53:13 GMT

"I didn't believe though that you could force the world to use a single approach for building web services."

Implicit in that statement seems to be the belief that, regardless of the approach taken, all connected systems should be built using services. That is clearly what the design of WCF is geared towards. When remoting was essentially deprecated in favor of WCF, Microsoft was saying that the only way you should ever be allowed to move data from one physical tier to another is through services.

I have been trying for several years now to impress upon web service evangelists that not all valid application architectures include the need for the kind of boundaries that services enforce. Every time I try to make that argument, I am told that I just don't recognize the value of those boundaries. The things is, I do recognize that value; but I also recognize that the value is dependent on the circumstances. The C# team is adding dynamic binding to the language because there are many circumstances when static binding is simply not possible or doesn't make sense; that doesn't mean that Anders has changed his mind about the value of static typing, but the fact is that enforcing it sometimes hinders more than it helps. Similarly, the boundaries enforced by service architectures often hinder more than they help.

I am trying to remain optimistic that the next iteration of WCF will take this into account. Hopefully you will address this issue in your future posts.

The Future of WCF, Part 2

Nicholas Allen's Indigo Blog — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 03:51:04 GMT

Having read part 1 will be helpful. As I mentioned last time, there were two markets in particular that