Professional C# 2005

Chapter 32. Future of Distributed Programming

In the last four chapters, you learned several different ways of using services across the network: Web services using ASP.NET, .NET Remoting, Message Queuing and Enterprise Services with DCOM as the native communication protocol. Every technology has its advantages and disadvantages. Writing Web services using ASP.NET, the services can be used from different platforms, while .NET Remoting and DCOM are bound to the Microsoft platform; comparing performance with these communication technologies, DCOM often is the fastest, followed by .NET Remoting and ASP.NET. The extension mechanisms are very different in that ASP.NET Web services can be extended by using SOAP headers, whereas .NET Remoting uses sinks. Extending DCOM is not supported. You get some overlapping features, but using them in tandem is often the best choice. For example, with many applications Web services are used as a front-end to serviced components. All these technologies have a different programming model, which requires many skills from the developer. What's the future?

This chapter shows the future of communication technology, a product that is currently known by its code name (WCF). WCF will offer features that are available today with ASP.NET Web services, .NET Remoting, Message Queuing, and Enterprise Services. There's something good and bad with the existing solutions. WCF combines the best of these technologies to form a new technology. However, instead of rewriting ...