WCF and portability

[Bob]

I've heard mention of 'portability' as a positive attribute with WCF,
but I'm not sure I follow. Is there work in progress to provide WCF
for Linux?

If WCF will not work across platforms, I was wondering if there's a
viable alternative that provides higher level structure, or is this
still the domain of sockets and hand-written data serialization?

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?=]

Re: WCF and portability

Bob wrote:

I've heard mention of 'portability' as a positive attribute with WCF,
but I'm not sure I follow. Is there work in progress to provide WCF
for Linux?
>
If WCF will not work across platforms, I was wondering if there's a
viable alternative that provides higher level structure, or is this
still the domain of sockets and hand-written data serialization?

WCF makes it easy to expose standards based web services, which
makes interoperabilit y with other language sand technologies
easier.

That is probably what they mean.

Arne

[Marc Gravell]

Re: WCF and portability

There is an "Olive" project to bring WCF into mono, but this is very
early at the moment; however, you can use WCF will standards-based
bindings such as the basicHttpBindin g and achieve cross-platform
compatibility. A little while ago I wrote a mono/SOAP client consuming
a MS .NET / WCF server; and the same should be possible between any
wsdl compatible client (java, etc).

Re hand-written data serialization; I've been working on "protobuf-
net", a (free) implementation of Google's "protocol buffers" cross-
platform, extensible binary serialization format for .NET (including,
but not limited to, WCF); and I've had a lot of questions *in
particular* from the mono community. So this might be worth looking at
if you go down the sockets route, but don't want to write lots of
serialization code.

http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-net/

Marc