Shh... IT in progress.

What happened to me?

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Well for all those people that wondered what happened to that post I was going to do about 2 months ago… here it isn’t ;)

I have unfortunately been stuck on a project.

My main project has been using .NET Remoting for XPO services and things were great, however over unreliable services such a 3G and Wireless I have found that .NET Remoting has some serious weaknesses. The basic weakness is no reliable session, in other words there is nothing to ensure packets arrive in the correct order and also doesn’t handle retrying (outside of what the TCP Transport layer does).

So pretty much I had to bite the bullet, I had to move my product out of the dark ages (.NET 2) and bring it up to date. So my choice was either 3.5 or 4. In the end I went with .NET 4, I figured I will have to include the framework anyway so I might as well include .NET 4.

This of course brings with it Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) which was included in .NET 3 and since then been improving with each release of the framework.

Learning WCF has been a interesting journey, I had used ASMX Web Services in the past before moving to .NET Remoting. I can say the WCF is vastly different in comparison.

It has also opened my eyes up a bit more to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which makes you have to think a bit differently.

I just read “Learning WCF” by Michele Bustamante (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101626/?CMP=OTL-GB2088480187&ATT=9780596101626) which has really helped alot. I have also started reading “Programming WCF Services” by Juval Löwy this seems to duplicate a fair bit from “Learning WCF” but seems to be just as informative.

So where does this leave my blog posts, well to be quite frank, probably still a couple of months away ;(

However there is a plus side to this, I will be posting my findings on XPO and WCF in the coming month. So far my initial testing has been promising.

One of the other reasoning for the move to WCF is the ability to then use Silverlight as a secondary interface to my application.

I will keep you informed. Till then happy programming to all.