Very interesting thread: “Am I wrong about WCF usage?” http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2910261&SiteID=1&mode=1
There are the complains about WCF.
Why Microsoft looks at the future only with loose-coupled WCF and depreciates the Remoting technology?
My experience is from the BizTalk side. It’s interesting that we have similar issues.
For example, using contracts in the current formats tends to be rigid. What I need in the many cases from the data/message contracts is “use this XML structures form the data I care for and, please, please, do not validate other parts of the data/messages. I don’t care if there are errors in those parts, if those parts have the right format, etc. I just don’t care.”
But the current XML format tends to force using the strict contracts.
From the versioning perspective it means I could not easily expand the current message contracts in the future versions. The client is forced to recognize the different formats and generate errors when it get slightly different format.
Form the OO perspective it means the client could not easily extract the parts of the message that client cares about and just ignore other parts.
From the integration perspective it means to transfer the message format problems/errors to the client side if this is safe. In many cases these errors belongs to the business-rule layer, the transmitting layer mustn’t work with these errors.
My understanding is the roots of the problem are in the XML standard. It does NOT have good ability to describe the “undefined” parts of the document/message. With the “right” XML the WCF could possibly (and easily) solve several issues discussed in this thread.