[mhomde]

I really liked Webservices in ASP.net when they were new, really easy to set up and you just had to add an attribute to the methods you wanted to expose. With WCF they went too far in covering all enterprise scenarios.

It would have been better if they kept and maintained a streamlined alternative. Forcing everyone to deal with the complexities of WCF isn't developer friendly.

This is a common anti-pattern in frameworks where they grow until they are a kitchen sink monster instead of splitting of into different frameworks streamlined for different purposes.

[ilitirit]

I agree with the gist, but I'm curious as to why you would use WCF when there were simpler existing solutions (eg. Web Services)? If you simplified WCF to decoration via attributes, what do you gain over ASP.net Web Services?

[mhomde]

as long as you don't need any of the features of WCF you shouldn't of course (though I think webservices become an obsolete technology).

As soon as you run into edge-cases with authentication, compression, binary formats etc you'd have to use WCF. I think many use WCF "just in case" they need those features

[tracker1]

Considering I've went from http to tcp services a number of times for improved performance, and you can simplify WCF clients a LOT via convention, it really isn't that bad...