[iamthepieman]

The first time I had to consume WS- services in .NET, with deeply nested data types I spent a week trying to figure out WCF and the WS endpoint (which was written in Java) and gave up.

I wrote a DSL to parse the messages and just stripped the message off the network stack before it even hit the application level where WCF would handle it. It gives me shivers just thinking about it.

[silverbax88]

WCF is ridiculously complex, has poor testing options and troubleshooting deep issues basically requires turning on logging and loading a massive data dump into a reader just to get some kind of generic error.

[ilitirit]

Why did you go all the way down to that level? If you could not generate the .NET types from the WSDL (WCF provides tools to do this), you could modify the message using WCF itself. No reason to use a DSL.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa717047%28v=vs.110...

[iamthepieman]

Because I was frustrated and could not figure out how Microsoft wanted the framework to be used. I was new to both WS and WCF at the time. getting WCF configuration working seemed more like a voodoo incantation than any other programming I've ever done.

And no I could not get .NET to generate types from the WSDL and I knew about the tools provided for that. They didn't work and I wasted a lot of time on them because everything I read said they should work.

I used a DSL because that's what I knew and because I had already wasted too much time.

I've since learned to avoid situations like this but that's a whole 'nother comment.