blinnov’s blog

Recently I have been evaluating different options and solutions for creating distributed network applications. Of course, this definition is too broad and there might be hundreds of answers and they all would be useful in different circumstances but I paid special attention to WCF.

As Microsoft released a Visual Studio 2008, I can hardly see any reasons why someone who is up to developing a distributed network application might choose anything different. New Studio even has a project template for WCF services, what makes network servers and clients development as easy as can be… But, of course, that would only work if no other platform except Windows is considered. Which is not uncommon.

So, what options are there if we need to build a client for existing WCF service that would work where .NET framework is not installed (because it is not available for that platform)? There is one way offered by Microsoft (using sproxy.exe) and some could use it. Other way involves writing “moniker” in .NET and then use it via COM. They both would work on windows platform only, moreover, I couldn’t make sproxy.exe to work with WCF service at all, so I had to look for the third option, which was gSOAP. And this worked.
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Or what?

Yes, I am C++ maniac and would write everything in C++, if I could, but I am not an idiot. I have written distributed network applications in C++ before, this is why for a new project I decided to see how .Net eases such tasks.

That’s true – Windows communication foundation looks pretty good. It’s straightforward, it hides all network stuff behind and even newly released VS 2008 has sufficient project templates that make WCF services creation as easy as can be.

Read more – it is not as easy as it seemed…