WCF and portability

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bob
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B

Bob

I've heard mention of 'portability' as a positive attribute with WCF,
but I'm not sure I follow. Is there work in progress to provide WCF
for Linux?

If WCF will not work across platforms, I was wondering if there's a
viable alternative that provides higher level structure, or is this
still the domain of sockets and hand-written data serialization?
 
Bob said:
I've heard mention of 'portability' as a positive attribute with WCF,
but I'm not sure I follow. Is there work in progress to provide WCF
for Linux?

If WCF will not work across platforms, I was wondering if there's a
viable alternative that provides higher level structure, or is this
still the domain of sockets and hand-written data serialization?
Click to expand...

WCF makes it easy to expose standards based web services, which
makes interoperability with other language sand technologies
easier.

That is probably what they mean.

Arne
 
There is an "Olive" project to bring WCF into mono, but this is very
early at the moment; however, you can use WCF will standards-based
bindings such as the basicHttpBinding and achieve cross-platform
compatibility. A little while ago I wrote a mono/SOAP client consuming
a MS .NET / WCF server; and the same should be possible between any
wsdl compatible client (java, etc).

Re hand-written data serialization; I've been working on "protobuf-
net", a (free) implementation of Google's "protocol buffers" cross-
platform, extensible binary serialization format for .NET (including,
but not limited to, WCF); and I've had a lot of questions *in
particular* from the mono community. So this might be worth looking at
if you go down the sockets route, but don't want to write lots of
serialization code.

http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-net/

Marc
 
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