WCF's SOA Implementation
The WCF team at Microsoft has been trying to deliver three big items to the development community. The design goals include:
Interoperability across platforms
Unification of existing technologies
Enabling service-oriented development
With the release of .NET 3.5, Microsoft is delivering on all fronts.
To maximize interoperability across platforms, WCF's architects chose SOAP as the native messaging protocol. This makes it possible for WCF applications running on Windows to reliably communicate with legacy applications, Mac OS X machines, Linux machines, Windows clients, Solaris machines, and anyone else out there who abides by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) specification. (The WS-I is an industry consortium chartered to promote interoperability among the stack of web services specifications.)
To unify existing technologies, WCF takes all the capabilities of the distributed systems' technology stacks and overlays a simplified clean API in System.ServiceModel. Thus, you are able to accomplish the same things that previously required ASMX, WSE, System.Messaging, .NET remoting, and other enterprise solutions, all from within WCF. This helps cut down a developer's time to implementation and reduces the complexity of dealing with distributed technologies.
The WCF team has faced up to the future in a big way. Designed from the ground up to facilitate the business orientation of modern software projects, WCF enables rather than hinders the design ...
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