This past Saturday I took part in the West Michigan .NET University. In addition to the .NET Bootcamp I did with Len, I presented on Web Service concepts and WCF. At the end of the WCF session I was asked if Microsoft was really committed to WCF or if something else will be replacing it in a few years.
I believe the answer is that Microsoft is committed to WCF.
If you look at all of the recent cloud-based offerings by Microsoft you can see it’s commitment to WCF in the API’s. These new platforms and services all communicate via services. An Azure application uses WCF services to communicate between it’s various worker and web roles. The SDK for .NET services is largely made up of extensions to WCF in the form of new bindings. Live Mesh allows you to access your content via service REST endpoints. All built on WCF.
So it’s clear to me that Microsoft is committed to WCF as the “center” of it’s on-going cloud strategy. It’s also clear to me that while deep knowledge of things such as custom behaviors and bindings can still be a “niche” skill, developers MUST have a solid working knowledge of WCF that goes beyond the standard “Hello World” sample.
Print | posted on Tuesday, April 07, 2009 3:04 PM