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Comment by anton_gogolev | Hacker News Reader

> This a good thing for those companies that have lots of WCF services.

I very much doubt that. WCF is one of the most over-engineered frameworks I've encountered so far, and I've seen many. It's an epitome of enterprisiness, with every miniscule detail configurable via XML, with countless layers of abstractions, factories and providers, with very specific modalities, with all kinds of pluggable serializers, with metric ton of other crap. Because WS-*.

So it's very unlikely that some average developer will go spelunking through the codebase to fix some obscure bug that occurs when interoperating with an Apache Axis-based Java web service that is using WS-ReliableMessaging with WS-Addressing over carrier pidgeons. Not gonna happen.

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> Because WS-* .

While WCF supports WS-* and is in large part organized around it, some of the complexity isn't "because WS-", its "because WCF is a higher-level abstraction that supports, among other things, WS-* ".

I mean, you can apply all that overengineered configuration to build REST services with WCF, too. You probably don't want to (unless you are already heavily invested in WCF), but you can.

>...its "because WCF is a higher-level abstraction that supports, among other things, WS-* "

And it fails spectacularly. I mean, _it works_, but it's a disaster to work with and write software against.

The entire abstraction is leaking profusely, all precisely "because WS-*". Who in their right mind will attempt to establish a family of standards for "transport-agnostic" communication, routing, serialization and whatnot when realistically 99% of the time HTTPS is all you ever need?

> And it fails spectacularly. I mean, _it works_, but it's a disaster to work with and write software against.

Can you give an example of how it's a disaster? I'm genuinely curious because I've had to use it for at least 5 years (I still support 1 WCF solution) and this was never my experience.

Have you used WCF talking to non-WCF WS-* things, or just WCF to WCF? My experience was that the latter (mostly) just worked but interop was somewhat of a nightmare, making the whole WS-* thing somewhat pointless. It wasn't really WCF's fault; just that no two WS-* implementations actually implemented things identically.

I've used it with all sorts of backends and clients. And you're right - in most cases it wasn't WCF's fault. Which is why I'm curious about why OP blames WCF.

> WCF is one of the most over-engineered frameworks I've encountered so far

This may be true to an extent, but rarely will you ever need to delve into that level of minutiae (which itself is a consequence of WS-*...). I've set up custom endpoints, but that's comparable to setting up custom logging with Log4J. I've extended/written custom Message Inspectors to log/analyze/manipulate data, but that was hardly complex as well, and comparable to what you would need to do in any other environment but without support of the framework.

For me the most frustrating thing working with WCF was probably correctly configuring Windows authentication/authorization simply because there are so many different ways things can fail with similar error messages. Everything else you mentioned is stuff that you rarely need to consider.

Couldn't they move to a more code and convention driven config system?

I know what you mean, though. I have this one web service that's the bane of my existence. No WSDL, it's WS-Transfer and MEX and WS-Sec with it's own STS...makes me weep thinking about it.

Again, very unlikely.

It will either be a godawful Fluent API on top of all the WCF craziness, or the conventions will be as unusable as they are in Entity Framework.

Old-style ASMX services were cool. Nothing fancy, no infinitely configurable doodads: just a single class annotated with attributes.

WCF does allow for code based configuration. There are actually 3 way to configure everything in WCF: Imperative code, Declarative attributes and (xml-based) config files.

Conventions are supported as well, but is woefully underused.

That said, WCF is a beast. If you need SOAP with federated security and bells and whistles, it is a very solid choice.

If you can make it through with REST you should avoid WCF. It is a time sink.

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