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I've been programming .NET since 1.1 and love the platform. It just works. But, I pick my technologies carefully. I called silverlight not working out. I've

by maresca 13y ago

I've been programming .NET since 1.1 and love the platform. It just works. But, I pick my technologies carefully. I called silverlight not working out. I've been staying away from WCF/WPF. No one writes in the news when something goes right, only wrong. This article is more rabble rousing than anything. You can focus on the things that are going wrong. If you are putting out new technologies, some are going to fail. That's the nature of the game.

chiph 13y ago
I agree - Silverlight was obviously a tactical response to the threat of Flash. When Flash went into (steep) decline, there was no reason to keep Silverlight around. Both of us called this one correctly. WCF, on the other hand, is doing really well and is a decent approach to a framework around enterprise communications. But I admit that more often than not, I'm hand-coding my proxies to avoid code-bloat from generated DTOs (I'd rather use a reference to a shared DLL so the compiler alerts me to breaking changes)
- maresca 13y ago
  There's something about WCF that rubs me the wrong way. I like coding Web Services. WCF just feels like bloat on top of web services. And traditional web services can be used cross-platform. I'm not sure WCF can. Maybe I'm just sticking with not fixing something that's not broken.
  - ChrisPebble 13y ago
    I think the sweet spot for WCF (for us at least) is for our internal APIs. The ability to easily expose the same service over a binary TCP stream or over HTTP makes a fantastic tool when you're trying to get a lot of different systems to talk to each other. For external or HTTP-only APIs I completely agree that it's often overkill. Frameworks like servicestack are much easier to work with in those cases.
  - dennisgorelik 13y ago
    Exactly: WCF == bloat. Bloat in XML, bloat in configuration, bloat in object model...
crag 13y ago
You know I was playing around with ASP Web Pages (Razor) and loved it. Too bad WebMatrix is Windows only.
- sergiotapia 13y ago
  Razor is the worlds most advanced and easy to use view templating enging. It's the easiest and most succinct view engine I've ever used and is a joy to work with.
  - MatthewPhillips 13y ago
    Seriously? Razor is just C# and strongly typed languages do not work well for templating. It's exceedingly difficult to make reusable partials in Razor, for example.

by maresca 13y ago

chiph 13y ago

I agree - Silverlight was obviously a tactical response to the threat of Flash. When Flash went into (steep) decline, there was no reason to keep Silverlight around. Both of us called this one correctly. WCF, on the other hand, is doing really well and is a decent approach to a framework around enterprise communications. But I admit that more often than not, I'm hand-coding my proxies to avoid code-bloat from generated DTOs (I'd rather use a reference to a shared DLL so the compiler alerts me to breaking changes)

maresca 13y ago
There's something about WCF that rubs me the wrong way. I like coding Web Services. WCF just feels like bloat on top of web services. And traditional web services can be used cross-platform. I'm not sure WCF can. Maybe I'm just sticking with not fixing something that's not broken.
- ChrisPebble 13y ago
  I think the sweet spot for WCF (for us at least) is for our internal APIs. The ability to easily expose the same service over a binary TCP stream or over HTTP makes a fantastic tool when you're trying to get a lot of different systems to talk to each other. For external or HTTP-only APIs I completely agree that it's often overkill. Frameworks like servicestack are much easier to work with in those cases.
- dennisgorelik 13y ago
  Exactly: WCF == bloat. Bloat in XML, bloat in configuration, bloat in object model...

crag 13y ago

You know I was playing around with ASP Web Pages (Razor) and loved it. Too bad WebMatrix is Windows only.

sergiotapia 13y ago
Razor is the worlds most advanced and easy to use view templating enging. It's the easiest and most succinct view engine I've ever used and is a joy to work with.
- MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  Seriously? Razor is just C# and strongly typed languages do not work well for templating. It's exceedingly difficult to make reusable partials in Razor, for example.