Published: WCF Interoperability with WSE 2.0 and the Migration Incentive

Blasphemy ...

It is finally published. After many, many, and I mean, many months of paying the process tax for this piece, it is finally LIVE !

I started this piece with the first ever March 2005 CTP of _WCF_ and I went through so many port demos and edit document cycles its so unbelievably painful ...

But it is really good to see this in online form and shape.

I started with this idea even though _MSFT_ has explicity stated that it will not support any form of interoperability between WSE 2.0 and WCF, even though it is "theoretically possible to develop Web services using WSE 2.0 in such a way that they can interoperate with WSE 3.0 (and WCF) by using only a reduced set of specifications"

More importantly, the main reason for the motivation to write such a piece is written in the article itself and I quote:

[BEGIN QUOTE]

Depending on timing, budget, complexity and a whole host of other requirements, some of these applications will need to be moved and migrated to WSE3.0 and some to WCF. Aaron Skonnard has provided a great resource in his “Service Station” column on MSDN on a brief overview on the migration of WSE 2.0 applications to WSE 3.0 ones. However, as stated in his article, there are some major changes in the programming model and architecture in WSE 3.0 and migrating them from WSE 2.0 may not be trivial.

Another very important factor to take note is while WinFX, and therefore WCF, is available downstream from Windows Vista to Windows 2003 and Windows XP. That is as far down as it goes. There still exists a huge installed base of Windows 2000 Servers out there running on server and data farms and if you need to implement the advanced Web Services stacks on those servers, WSE is still a very important strategy you cannot ignore.

As noted in the above guidelines, even though Microsoft will not guarantee interoperability between WSE 2.0 and WCF, the good news is that there are a few WSE 2.0 common scenarios, which can allow wire-interoperability with WCF. I will illustrate them in the next section...

So, this article will outlined WHAT that reduced set of specifications are and HOW to go about using them.

Many Special Thanks go to Kirill, the Interop PM on WCF, who gave me a couple of tips to get over the port-over humps I had thoughout this piece since last year. And of course, I cannot forget Clemens, who is the catalyst to making this publication happen when he came onboard.

I hope this helps at least someone out there. Enjoy !