With WCF now supporting "REST"-style services, some bloggers have pronounced the death of SOAP and WS-*. Wouldn't it be nice if we actually had that level of influence :-) truth is we see alot of requests for both SOAP and REST - that's why we support both in Orcas. Stepping back, there's an old saying at Microsoft - "applications drive platforms". It was true with Office and Windows, and it's true today in the distributed systems space. There are many "platforms" for software integration in today's world: Queuing systems like MSMQ, MQSeries, JMS "ESB"s like Tibco or BizTalk Server Adapter-oriented EAI suites like you find in BizTalk, SeeBeyond, WebMethods Web services (SOAP, WS-*) The Web itself (often known as "REST") Each of these exist for a reason - there are applications for which they are well-suited. With WCF, we realized early on that there won't be one true protocol or integration technology. We designed WCF by looking at all the integration technologies we had at the time - .NET Remoting, MSMQ, COM+/Enterprise Services, BizTalk, ASMX/WSE - and creating an architecture where we could have a single programming model that enabled you to achieve all of those scenarios. That's not to say that we replaced all the underlying technologies - in many cases we just made sure that we could "plumb" existing technologies under that single programming model. So we have an MSMQ binding, a SOAP/WS-* binding, all of the BTS adapters are now being written as WCF channels, and in Orcas we're adding the "Web" binding. We believe that's a pretty unique proposition in the platform world - and the key value is that no matter what the scenario, we have a single set of API's in the .NET Framework that will let you achieve it. Moreover, adopting WCF gives you a nice measure of future-proofing - any new integration technologies that emerge can be supported as a WCF binding. That, in essence, is the core value proposition of WCF. In my entry about our Orcas "Web" features, I've already (indirectly) discussed some of the apps that will drive WCF adoption on the Web: ASP.NET AJAX pages and Silverlight apps are backed by WCF services support for JSON, RSS, and ATOM looks to be attractive to folks who are using Web protocols and formats for building services on the Web the new programming model constructs that support Web semantics ([WebGet] / [WebInvoke] and UriTemplates) make WCF a good choice for building REST services on the .NET platform It's also worth articulating the types Read More...