I finally had the chance to meet Steve Maine of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, codename "Indigo") fame face-to-face. While Steve and I actually worked "together" for most of my Avanade career we hadn't met, and it was one of my objectives at the PDC to rectify that.
Thanks to Matt Joe we met at the Ask the Experts session Thursday night and we had an interesting discussion regarding the WCF "messaging paradigm". It came up in the context of a discussion regarding the Service Activity Generator. One of my positioning statements for this utility is that many developers don't want to - or need to - think about the messaging infrastructure that the WCF declarative model hides under the covers. Steve, on the other hand, said that the product team is actually re-thinking this model and may want to have the developer be exposed to more of the messaging paradigm.
Consider the following approach:
>> Construct request message
>> Submit request message to service
>> Receive response message
>> Parse response message to retrieve "interesting" data
vs. the following:
>> Call service method and receive "interesting" data as the return value
Which do you prefer? Particularly when building a composite application, when you're going to use this paradigm dozens, if not hundreds, of times.
I'd like to invite Steve to respond here to see if we can get some interesting dialog going on the topic. Here's your chance to potentially influence a product direction, so jump in!
Some of my earlier posts alluded to the announcements that were made at PDC - Microsoft's release of a platform-level workflow technology, known as Windows Workflow Foundation. I was fortunate enough to participate in the early adopter program and be exposed to this exciting new framework several months ago. While there may have been more splash around some of the other product announcements, this one is - to me - the most exciting as I believe it will have the biggest impact on how we utilize service oriented architectures across the enterprise.
I'm announcing here my first contribution to the community; the Service Activity Generator. This utility, currently an alpha release, enables service (WCF) developers to expose their services as custom WWF Activities without doing anything more complicated than adding an additional attribute to the service operation. Download the alpha release, along with a walkthrough that will guide you through building your first automatically-generated Service Activity, and submit your feedback on my blog.