Pre-con: Working with WCF – Demonstration and Perspectives

Juval Lowy on WCF and the death of .NET

Among the various pre-conference sessions the most interesting seemed to be the WCF one. In fact it turned out to be an animated introduction to WCF with the message:

.NET is dead! WCF is the new .NET

Now, this might seem a bit upsetting to most developers. Why would, this animated and quite entertaining man, Juval Lowy, say something like this? Well, quite simply he wants to point out that there exists major pitfalls in building applications on just the .NET platform. In fact, most of the code we produce aim to solve the plumbing in our architecture. Plumbing between layers, plumbing between systems, plumbing between technologies and so on... A figure of 95% plumbing and 5% business logic was mentioned.

What WCF does it removes the plumbing. At least the need for the developer to him- or herself code the plumbing. In WCF the plumbing is already provided, it is standardized and extensible at the same time. The WCF contains all the plumbing for realiability, security, connectivity and so on that you in reality never have the time to finish in customer projects. Why? Simply because the customers almost never pays for this, it is simply assumed that it is there, but actually coding it is far more time consuming than the actual solution.

All in all, WCF provides three major points that no prior platform or product (both Microsoft and non-microsoft) provides:

• Interopability


• Productivity


• Extensibility

Because the WCF framework (yes, framework) communication is based on messages and those messages are based on common standards (such as the WS-* standards) it provides full interoperability with other systems and solutions (e.g. Java, COM).

Since all the required plumbing is provided the boost in productivity is enormous. Most errors in developed applications are in the actual plumbing, not in the actual business logic so also in the maintenance phase there is a productivity boost.

WCF is built on the .NET 2.0 framework and each part is extensible and changeable.

Now, with all this being said it definately points to a major direction from MS on how applications and solutions should be built. I think we can expect more along these lines during the rest of the conference as this is all a part of what for instance Oslo provides.