Most people think PDC starts at Monday the 27th, however for me (and for ~1000 more people :-)) PDC started at Sunday with the pre-conference.
I went to hear Juval Lowy and Ron Jacobs speaking on WCF. Juval has a quite radical view on WCF – WCF is no less than the .NET killer and the new way to write every application in the world (well, maybe except high end graphics and device drivers). I must say his argument is quite convincing argument – with WCF you have logging, timeouts, performance counters & thread management out of the box, and this provides a step forward from .NET, exactly as .NET was a step forward from COM / C++.
Juval presented an interesting study – in the average enterprise solution, about 3% of the time is dedicated to solve the business solution, while 97% is dedicated to "plumbing" – messaging, connectivity, logging, security, etc. etc. This ration tends to worsen over time, as most of the maintenance time is also dedicated to plumbing problem.
I am not sure I totally agreed with the conclusion, that using WCF can make programmer 20 times more productive (I guess that even with WCF the time dedicated to plumbing does not go away so easily). However I definitely agree that doing "plumbing" right can be the difference between successful and failed project.
Ron presented REST services over WCF, which seems like a Microsoft attempt to make some peace with the web community and save some bandwidth in the way. Interestingly Juval presented WCF as something far larger than "web services platform" (as Microsoft’s "official" claim) while Ron showed the right way to work if you anyway want to use WCF for mere web services :-).
There were about 500 participants in the session (I did not know that so many people are willing to give up Sunday just to hear about WCF!). Interestingly, a vast majority of the audience was from overseas. I am sad to say that the ratio of males to females in the audience was worst than the ratio of plumbing to business code in Juval’s study (out of the 500, I think I spotted two or three women in the audience). Is infrastructure programming a male only profession? I find that hard to believe…
Takeaways:
- Take your infrastructure (plumbing) code seriously
- WCF is much more than just web services, but if you are building web services, look at WCF+REST
- Look for building all your code using WCF (preferably with MSMQ binding, of course :-))
Overall a great session. I set for eight hours with no intermission except lunch and loved every minute.
Looking forward to the rest of the PDC….
Yoel's Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) space 
Sounds like they might be trying to reshape the business case for WCF to get more companies using it.At the last event I attended, the question of "Who is using WCF in their enterprise solutions?" resulted in only a couple of hands going up.Glad to hear the event was fruitful!
Hi Chris,
Actually Juval is not a Microsoft employee (he even made fun of Vista during the presentation, and moved to VPC running Windows XP so that everything will work :-)). He is definitely deeply invested in WCF, however, and has a very strong interest in its success.
I agree that WCF is catching quite slow – just like Windows NT (remember NT 3.1?) COM or .NET did not catch right away. I myself had the first chance to write a real production application using WCF only 6 months ago. However Microsoft is investing very heavily in this platform (its dev team is 50% larger than the original .NET team) and it keeps presenting it as the standard communication platform. With communication becoming the basic glue of the OS (see the new Windows Azure announcement) it looks like WCF is going to catch up eventually.