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WCF is Open Source

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121–130 of 149 posts

Re: WCF is Open Source

#121
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really liked Webservices in ASP.net when they were new, really easy to set up and you just had to add an attribute to the methods you wanted to expose. With WCF they went too far in covering all enterprise scenarios. It would have been better if they kept and maintained a streamlined alternative. Forcing everyone to deal with the complexities of WCF isn't developer friendly. This is a common anti-pattern in framewo…

I agree with the gist, but I'm curious as to why you would use WCF when there were simpler existing solutions (eg. Web Services)? If you simplified WCF to decoration via attributes, what do you gain over ASP.net Web Services?

as long as you don't need any of the features of WCF you shouldn't of course (though I think webservices become an obsolete technology).

As soon as you run into edge-cases with authentication, compression, binary formats etc you'd have to use WCF. I think many use WCF "just in case" they need those features

Re: WCF is Open Source

#122

Never again will I work on WCF. I don't put the skill or experience on my resume and I have refused several jobs where it was required. Too brittle, complex, and with REST/OAuth 2, entirely unnecessary.

I was with you right until OAuth :) That thing is not as bad as WCF but still...

Re: WCF is Open Source

#123
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always surprised by the people asking "bring VB6 back". I'd like to know why - is it because you're stuck maintaining VB6 applications that can't be/haven't been updated to VB.net or C#? I used VB6 extensively back in the day, and I am very glad indeed that it's now dead.

It is ridiculously easy to create simple GUI apps with it, its limitations force you to write straightforward code (otherwise it becomes too much of a hassle and you go to another language) and provides a very good debugging environment which allow you to inspect and modify a program as it is running in a graphical way. It is basically an extremely simple scripting language attached to a GUI designer (literally, orig…

I have only bad experiences with VB6 (had to maintain some unmaintainable apps...) but I loved Delphi 5 for pretty much all the reasons you mentioned.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#126
post #120

[deleted]

I work in risk management for a financial institution. And although I'm on the "business" side of things, I do have to develop a lot of applications for own quant finance work. And frankly, to my team subsets of WCF (like for example, DataContracts) are becoming invaluable.

Most of the comments I see here mention a JSON API or some other "REST" architecture suitable for a web app as a better alternative. This gives off an extreme "let them eat cake" kind of vibe. Seriously, there are other kind of systems than web apps. Having a way to strictly define your interfaces and your data flows, having an ability to quickly validate data that you get and communicate which kind of data you want is extremely important in situations where correctness of the result comes first, and you don't have control over the whole system landscape.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#127
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I've been using ServiceStack pre-commercial for over two years. The clean, flexible, RESTful routing and lean extensions are a breath of fresh air compared to previous frustrations with the hodge-podge WCF 'REST toolkit'. Mythz as an architect and maintainer is spot on. I had thought that MS might be on it now with Web API, but your comment suggests not.

Is ServiceStack OSS being maintained by a community?

Don't think so. There was some discussion following the announcement but it never came to anything afaik.

The time and effort mythz et al put in would more than justify paying for a license vs taking on the mantle in my case.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#128
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always surprised by the people asking "bring VB6 back". I'd like to know why - is it because you're stuck maintaining VB6 applications that can't be/haven't been updated to VB.net or C#? I used VB6 extensively back in the day, and I am very glad indeed that it's now dead.

It is ridiculously easy to create simple GUI apps with it, its limitations force you to write straightforward code (otherwise it becomes too much of a hassle and you go to another language) and provides a very good debugging environment which allow you to inspect and modify a program as it is running in a graphical way. It is basically an extremely simple scripting language attached to a GUI designer (literally, orig…

Fun trivia: The first version of UnrealEd, the editor for the Unreal Engine 1 (used in Unreal, Wheel of Time, Rune, Deus Ex, UT99, Clive Barker's Undying etc.), was written in VB (of course, it used the renderer via interop).

Re: WCF is Open Source

#129

WCF is great if you want to make a single data service available as JSON via REST, XML via SOAP, a custom binary protocol via raw TCP, and who-knows-what else. In practice you're almost always better off just picking a single format for your endpoint, in which case there's no reason to use WCF.

Or if you want to flow delegated credentials, or use cross-system transactions. The enterprise stuff actually does something that can be useful inside a company.

Also, the major advantage of SOAP is that at least it has a service description. So generating clients is an easy one step process (and, having shipped such a service, when works on many platforms and languages reasonably well). All these new HTTP/JSON APIs require custom clients each time. Until they invent WSDL for such services... And full circle. Except JSON instead of XML, so it's totally OK.

Re: WCF is Open Source

#130
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I know you worked hard on it but this comes from real experience. We had an absolute nightmare debugging strange issues in the cache and traced it to this. Probably an older version though.

What would be your opinion on redis on a windows machine? Is it "production" ready?

azure redis cache service uses redis on win so yes
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