WCF is Open Source

#1

Post by Vitallium » Wed, May 20, 2015, 1:10 PM UTC

Re: WCF is Open Source

#2

Post by sudioStudio64 » Wed, May 20, 2015, 1:26 PM UTC

I've always been interested in WCF. This a good thing for those companies that have lots of WCF services.

That being said...Scott Hanselman calls it WS-Death Star for a reason. (WS-*, heh. Nerd Jokes. Check.) Hopefully this kick starts the same kind of rapid evolution that Asp.net MVC had after it was open sourced.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#3

Post by unwind » Wed, May 20, 2015, 1:26 PM UTC

As a .Net outsider, it's not very inclusive of them to have an acronym in the title like that.

I had to look down on the page to figure out that it means "Windows Communication Foundation". It was not easy to quickly figure out what this actually means, but I guess that's since it's highly technical and I'm not immersed in the Microsoft/.Net talk.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#4

Post by atlantic » Wed, May 20, 2015, 1:30 PM UTC

Judging by the tone of some of the comments so far, and in keeping with the spirit of the times, maybe we should include a trigger warning in the title of any Microsoft-related news.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#5

Post by apalmer » Wed, May 20, 2015, 1:30 PM UTC

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #2

I've always been interested in WCF. This a good thing for those companies that have lots of WCF services. That being said...Scott Hanselman calls it WS-Death Star for a reason. (WS-*, heh. Nerd Jokes. Check.) Hopefully this kick starts the same kind of rapid evolution that Asp.net MVC had after it was open sourced.

Unlikely...

A lot of the complexity is baked into the WS standards of which WCF is only an implementation. So until new standards are rolled out there is a limit to how much clean up can happen.

Then the other thing is the fundamental concept of WCF requires a lot of inherent complexity.

There is still a good amount of complex for complex's sake that could be cleaned up so hopefully that happens.

But its been said WCF is pretty much dead so not sure how much effort will go into it.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#6

Post by vdnkh » Wed, May 20, 2015, 1:38 PM UTC

unwind wrote: post #3

As a .Net outsider, it's not very inclusive of them to have an acronym in the title like that. I had to look down on the page to figure out that it means "Windows Communication Foundation". It was not easy to quickly figure out what this actually means, but I guess that's since it's highly technical and I'm not immersed in the Microsoft/.Net talk.

I feel like MS is pretty good with their acronyms. Usually just Windows% or Microsoft%. OSS, on the other hand, is a bit ridiculous.

It's time [to] explain the meaning of "Hurd". "Hurd" stands for "Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons". And, then, "Hird" stands for "Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth". We have here, to my knowledge, the first software to be named by a pair of mutually recursive acronyms.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#7

Post by WDCDev » Wed, May 20, 2015, 1:39 PM UTC

WCF was built for the WS-* world, and as such is over-loaded with complexity that is covered up by way way too much abstraction.

If you don't need WS-*, use Web API services self hosted with Katana if you need to exchange data between applications/processes instead.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#8

Post by anton_gogolev » Wed, May 20, 2015, 1:40 PM UTC

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #2

I've always been interested in WCF. This a good thing for those companies that have lots of WCF services. That being said...Scott Hanselman calls it WS-Death Star for a reason. (WS-*, heh. Nerd Jokes. Check.) Hopefully this kick starts the same kind of rapid evolution that Asp.net MVC had after it was open sourced.

> This a good thing for those companies that have lots of WCF services.

I very much doubt that. WCF is one of the most over-engineered frameworks I've encountered so far, and I've seen many. It's an epitome of enterprisiness, with every miniscule detail configurable via XML, with countless layers of abstractions, factories and providers, with very specific modalities, with all kinds of pluggable serializers, with metric ton of other crap. Because WS-*.

So it's very unlikely that some average developer will go spelunking through the codebase to fix some obscure bug that occurs when interoperating with an Apache Axis-based Java web service that is using WS-ReliableMessaging with WS-Addressing over carrier pidgeons. Not gonna happen.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#9

Post by sudioStudio64 » Wed, May 20, 2015, 1:44 PM UTC

apalmer wrote: post #5

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #2

I've always been interested in WCF. This a good thing for those companies that have lots of WCF services. That being said...Scott Hanselman calls it WS-Death Star for a reason. (WS-*, heh. Nerd Jokes. Check.) Hopefully this kick starts the same kind of rapid evolution that Asp.net MVC had after it was open sourced.

Unlikely... A lot of the complexity is baked into the WS standards of which WCF is only an implementation. So until new standards are rolled out there is a limit to how much clean up can happen. Then the other thing is the fundamental concept of WCF requires a lot of inherent complexity. There is still a good amount of complex for complex's sake that could be cleaned up so hopefully that happens. But its been said WC…

A lot of places out there have some very large numbers of WCF endpoints doing production work. I'm not sure how dead it really is.

I know REST/JSON is the new hotness, but there is a bunch of that stuff out there.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#10

Post by ghuntley » Wed, May 20, 2015, 1:44 PM UTC

WDCDev wrote: post #7

WCF was built for the WS-* world, and as such is over-loaded with complexity that is covered up by way way too much abstraction. If you don't need WS-*, use Web API services self hosted with Katana if you need to exchange data between applications/processes instead.

Roll your own using Katana? Yeah that'll work but consider just using http://nancyfx.org/ or if you need something more structured https://servicestack.net/ | http://www.asp.net/web-api