At the risk of being argumentative, we asked for this. Maybe not you or me specifically, but the community at large has. I agree the number of technologies at play, particularly in this space is large but it makes it all the more *interesting* to make those architectural choices. In some ways, less choice is better as the number of possibilities and combinations are less, thus decisions are more constrained and easier to get to.
However, the flexibility afforded to us now is great. The better technologies will rise, the lesser ones either improved, integrated or discarded and this is our task. In a properly architected system, the risk of choice of a communications technology can be mitigated. However, we are also human and can introduce dependencies where in hindsight, this was a bad thing. We live and learn. It goes back to the "circle of dev life" previously mentioned. Never believe the hype. Accept it for what it is, experience it, come to an informed decision based on that, and your educated judgement. Remember, .Net remoting is still there :) - Glav From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Price Sent: Saturday, 2 February 2013 11:52 AM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: SPAM-LOW Re: WCF service best practises I must be getting old too Greg. Your rants are starting to make sense. I'm even nodding my head as I read. I've said it before, they invent this stuff faster than anyone can learn it. Lets hope its heading in the right direction. For the children's sake. On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 7:15 AM, Greg Keogh <g...@mira.net <mailto:g...@mira.net> > wrote: Folks, I'm pleased to see that other people here are irritated by the number of choices we have for communication and by the complexity of WCF. I was also pleased to see someone else was bewlidered by having WebAPI buried inside MVC and found a way of starting with a managable skeleton project. Luckily I can delay my confusion over using WCF or whatever else is trendy this week, as the core working code of my service is actually inside a neutral DLL. I can write and test this code totally independly of how it will be published, then later I can wrap it in thin code to publish it in whatever ways I want. That will give me time to fiddle around with Web API. Overall though, I'm getting utterly fed-up with the number of technologies, kits, standards, languages, scripts, dependencies, conventions, platforms, etc. Every month I get the MSDN magazine posted to me and I dread opening it to see how many dozen new acronymns have been invented and discover how all of my old apps are obsolete because there is a new and better things to do it. I must be getting old too, as I pine for the previous decades of programming where there was less choice and everything just goddamn worked and was documented. Now I spend whole days futzing around to try something out or desperately searching the Internet for clues on an incomprehensible errors. There was a time when you could feel good as being a well-rounded programmer with good general knowledge. These days it's practically impossible to be well-rounded in every significant aspect of programming without experimenting and studying 18 hours every day and skipping eating and bathing. It's like trying to understand every working part of a Jumbo Jet. Instead of converging and stabilising in modern times, software development is disintegrating into a jumble of parts, of which many are nearly duplicated, conflicting, poorly documented, unstable, overly-complex, inter-dependent and multi-versioned. I'm finding that the joy of computer programming is being sucked out of me week by week. The thing that sh*ts me most is what came out of the discussion weeks ago about how there is no single reliable way of writing multi-platform software. To do that you have to be boffin of C#, C, C++, JavaScript, Java and all of their supporting kits. Oh well, back to Silverlight 4 coding this morning ... and that's nearly obsolete already!! Greg
