I am pleased by the quality of comments and responses to my most recent admittedly rather, uh, blunt post. Sam Marcuccio (and others)
wonder why I'm so harsh on Indigo (oops, WCF). I'll point Sam and others to this
post from Bruce Williams. As you can see from my comments back then, I've now actually mellowed out a bit about Indigo. I continue to believe that the underlying technology in WCF is a brilliant piece of work that's crippled by the fact that the only really accessible interface to it is the same old distributed object model that we've come to know and hate. If the WCF team really understood messaging and weren't trapped in the old distributed object world, it could be a revolutionary technology. As it is, Sam Gentile is correct in asserting that they're largely just
reinventing DCE RPC.
Udi Dahan's
post is right on point. My desire to follow the layout of Rich's article obscured my main point about messaging. Udi is exactly right that key to building a successful service is implementing an asynchronous messaging mechanism. If you are sufficiently clever, you can do that with just about any protocol, but for the typical developer or architect, by far the easiest is System.Messaging. If you've ever done any MSMQ programming, you'll see right away how to map Udi's proposed messaging design to the System.Messaging API. If you've never done any MSMQ programming, take a look at this
post from the Solutions Monkey (I love that name for a blog).
Whether or not you've done any MSMQ programming, you definitely need to go read David Ing's
latest. And I'm not just saying that because he left a nice comment here.
Posted
Aug 07 2005, 09:34 PM
by
john-cavnar-johnson