WCF - Absolutely Amazing
(
Oct 16 2007 - 07:41:59 AM by
Timothy Khouri) - [
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One of my biggest passions in the development world has always been networked programs. For the longest time I've had bitter sweet feelings about Remoting in .NET. Basically, remoting is one of the most beautiful and powerful architectures that .NET has pioneered. The one issue that I've had has been that Remoting in .NET was limited to a "one-way" architecture.
I can't even explain how excited I was when I learned about WCF (released in .NET 3.0 about a year ago) and the "duplex" capabilities thereof... take five minutes, read this article: http://www.codeproject.com/WCF/WCF_Duplex_UI_Threads.asp
Jeff Barnes covers the new features very well and explains some useful "gotchas" that is important to know. For instance thread-afinity and deadlocks (two subjects that I didn't even consider until I realzied the potential dangers).
Kudos To Microsoft
I was curious to see how they would provide support for reaching back to the client connections, so as I read on I caught site of this: "OperationContext.Current". Now, that might not say a lot to you, but it almost made me cry. The idea of a static contextual property that exposes a singleton-like instance back to the client is the perfect way to handle such things (just like HttpContext.Current for you web developers out there).
Again, great article, and great work by Microsoft.