What am I missing about WCF?

Question

I\'ve been developing in MS technologies for longer than I care to remember at this stage. When .NET arrived on the scene I thought they hit the nail on the head and with ea

Answer 1

Looking at how you mention XML and SQL, you are using WCF to build a web application or an actual web service (service on the Web, and not just SOAP exchange).

It helps thinking about WCF as a replacement for .NET Remoting (or DCOM, CORBA etc), which also happens to support web services as one of the transports. Interfaces declared in assemblies, behavior of proxies, certain configuration options and other aspects of the framework that look unnatural and complicated from perspective of web apps - actually do work out of the box for DCOM-style systems of distributed objects.

To answer the question: no, you are not missing anything and using WCF for web applications is complicated, because WCF is not a framework for building web applications. Probably such framework can be built on top of it, but I would hate to see WCF itself changed to move into web realm.