Monday, September 10, 2007

WCF not well documented!

I know it's a pretty new technology, but I believe Microsoft should have done a better job with it's documentation. If you take a look at Microsoft's WCF forum you'll notice for the kind of questions people is doing that something is missing. There's of course the WCF for Dummies example where you host your services in your IIS and create a win app as the client. Everything goes smooth there. But what if you want your services to run as a Windows Service? what if you want to test it as a ConsoleApp?

I believe there's still some critical parts missing. If you come from Remoting you had an easy way to startup all your services with the RemotingConfiguration class, but in WCF there's nothing like it so if you have 10 or 20 services, as I have, you have the write two lines of code to create the service and open it to each and everyone of them... not cool! I've been trying to avoid it but I guess I'll have to run create that class myself. For some magical reason when you host your services in IIS, IIS starts them up. What about the rest of us?

It seems to me Microsoft was urged to release WCF and some critical parts are missing and other not well documented or not documented at all (it's real hard to find good info).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sebastian,

I am one of the programming writers who works on the WCF documentation. I would like to follow up with you regarding your concerns with our documentation. Please contact me at: migree (at) microsoft (dot) com so we can discuss this further.

Thanks,

Michael Green
WCF Documentation Team

Anonymous said...

So...what's the verdict?