[dragonwriter]

> Because WS-* .

While WCF supports WS-* and is in large part organized around it, some of the complexity isn't "because WS-", its "because WCF is a higher-level abstraction that supports, among other things, WS-* ".

I mean, you can apply all that overengineered configuration to build REST services with WCF, too. You probably don't want to (unless you are already heavily invested in WCF), but you can.

[anton_gogolev]

>...its "because WCF is a higher-level abstraction that supports, among other things, WS-* "

And it fails spectacularly. I mean, _it works_, but it's a disaster to work with and write software against.

The entire abstraction is leaking profusely, all precisely "because WS-*". Who in their right mind will attempt to establish a family of standards for "transport-agnostic" communication, routing, serialization and whatnot when realistically 99% of the time HTTPS is all you ever need?

[ilitirit]

> And it fails spectacularly. I mean, _it works_, but it's a disaster to work with and write software against.

Can you give an example of how it's a disaster? I'm genuinely curious because I've had to use it for at least 5 years (I still support 1 WCF solution) and this was never my experience.

[plorkyeran]

Have you used WCF talking to non-WCF WS-* things, or just WCF to WCF? My experience was that the latter (mostly) just worked but interop was somewhat of a nightmare, making the whole WS-* thing somewhat pointless. It wasn't really WCF's fault; just that no two WS-* implementations actually implemented things identically.

[ilitirit]

I've used it with all sorts of backends and clients. And you're right - in most cases it wasn't WCF's fault. Which is why I'm curious about why OP blames WCF.