This post is all about giving anapology. I am a recovering language bigot. I have been a VB guy who has been known to start wars with other bloggers regarding VB.Net as a Dev. Langauge especially when I think the other blogger is maligning VB and therefore maligning my abilities as a developer. Juval Löwy is someone who I have called into question a number of times. Mainly because (and I usually admit this) he wrote an article back in VSM about 2 years ago where he predicted the direction of C# and VB. He stated that C# was going to be more for enterprise developers and <my_perception>that VB was more for the RAD type of developer that wants to rapidly develop something without having a lot of programming knowledge or skill </my_perception>.
I took this thinking and decided that Juval couldn't possibly know anything about the future of VB because no way was VB.NET going to move back to the land of VB6... it was way too cool and too powerful. Guess what? Juval was right. I won't repost, but back in April, I blogged about my future language choices here.
Juval was also right about something else. As I know more and more about WCF and what it "looks like", I realize that if you want to the easy migration to WCF (AKA Indigo) from your objects you should use Enterprise Services (Juval's favorite). I know that in the past (see
here). I have said that Juval had to be wrong (based on my limited knowledge), and you should be able to use anything... I think I complained about why he was the only one talking about Enterprise Services ("ES", hereafter). I now know a little more about ES.
So let me take you down the road of a couple thoughts of mine to show in my perception and then I point out a better discussion.
- WCF is being built to give to .NET what we had in COM+. A mechanism to manage our remote objects and a better way to do them. It will have all the features of COM+.
- ES is a remote object technology that can be used today to provide the same types of features that COM+ provides (transaction, security,
etc.)... I know this isn't all correct, but COM+ and ES are very comparable.
- Neither Remoting nor Web Services provide the same type of functionality as COM+ without some kind of helper (WSE comes to mind
for Web Services)
- It stands to reason that WCF and ES will be very similar and migration from ES should be seamless... in other words Juval is right...
Of course you can also read this article (which was written by Juval) to see a better explanation.
<personal_note to="Juval Löwy">
Juval, I'm so sorry. I have been such an idiot about this. I guess I was so reactive to my perception that you were calling my language "weak" (and therefore feeling a personal attack on me and my skills) that it absolutely tainted my ability to think rationally. I'm really, really sorry. (of course, I should have checked your credentials a little better... now that I know that you sit on some of MS committees that help direct VB).
</personal_note>
Print | posted on Tuesday, November 08, 2005 1:33 PM