Last night at my .NET user group meeting the topic was WCF (Windows Communication Foundation); our speaker was a Microsoft evangelist from Hartford (his blog). WCF is Microsoft’s next evolution beyond webservices; my take-aways from the presentation:
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separation of concerns; focus on the business logic and not the plumbing
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configuration magic (also seen as the rough edge of the current version of WCF; MS is working on improving that piece for admins)
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unshackled from IIS
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Retarget your end point to JSON, RSS, you name it, with just a few lines (one line?) of code
Of course there’s a lot more to it than that… I plan on looking into it more when I can find the time. If you like webservices I think you're going to love WCF. .NET 3.5 SP1 is coming out sometime this summer, they’re going to be adding further enhancements to WCF in that release.