Programming WCF Services

Foreword

Juval Löwy, the author of this most excellent book, and I share a passion: designing and building distributed systems—or, as they are increasingly called today, connected systems. Both of us have walked a very similar path on the technology trail, even though we’ve always been working in different companies and on different projects and, for most of our careers, also on different continents.

In the early 1990s when both of us slowly got hooked on the idea of doing something on one computer that would cause something to happen on another computer, the world of distributed systems application platform technologies just began taking shape around us.

As workstations and server hardware became more affordable and increasingly commoditized, building large systems that weren’t dependent on a single transaction hub in the middle became an economically attractive proposition. The same was true for wide-area data exchange options. It’s difficult to believe these days, but my telephone company insisted back then that more than 1,200 bits per second would never be possible over phone lines. Today they run 6 MBps and more over the same copper. These were exciting times.

With the technology for affordable distributed computing coming together, two large distributed systems technology camps emerged in the early ’90s: DCE, led by Digital Equipment Corporation (eventually gobbled up by Compaq, gobbled up by HP) and CORBA, driven by the OMG consortium, with a great dose of IBM backing. In 1996-1997, ...