WCF and Windows 2000

WCF and Windows 2000

• Specfiction

  Thanks for your answer Steve.

  Does this means that our client application should support two distinct communication apis to talk to our WCF based server:

  - one (ASPX,MSMQ, .net remoting) when the client runs on Win2000

  -WCF client api when running on winXPsp2 or later

  Or should we only choose one api on the client side (let say MSMQ is the right one) for both win2000 et winxp sp2 and later.

  Are there any best practises yet out there to handle such a situation

  Thanks.

  Benoit.

  
  

• Hope_UAE

  Or you can use WSE 3.0 on the client. WSE 3.0 is based on .NET 2.0, it runs on Win2000/WinXP/Win2003, and it is interoperable with WCF.
  
  
  

• Philip Harris

  It's hard to speak definitively without having visibility into your specific application and requirements...ultimately I think you need to use your best judgement as to whether its worth making the investment to support two versions of a client app that runs on two operating systems. You may already do this (or plan to); hard to say -- if you're writing an XPSP2 client anyway I'd say use WCF on the client. If you need to support a single code base on two OS's, you're kind of stuck using existing API's such as System.Messaging.
  
  The high-order bit here is that WCF is designed specifically not to care what API the client uses to send it messages. As such, which client API you use to talk to WCF depends largely on what the requirements of the client are. The server infrastructure shouldn't factor into it.
  
  
  

• nick0033

  As far as client-side operating systems goes, WCF requires XPSP2 or Vista. The reason being is that we depend on many of operating system enhancements released with SP2 that just aren't available on Windows 2000.
  
  I don't that should prohibit your company from moving to WCF on the server, though. Depending on what technology those Windows 2000 clients are using to talk to the server, WCF can interoperate with them by using:
  - the basicHttpBinding (if those clients are ASMX)
  - the MSMQ integration binding (if they currently speak MSMQ)
  - our COM+ integration features (if they currently use Enterprise Services)
  
  One of the major goals of Indigo was to make sure we work well even when WCF isn't present on both sides. I think your company would be in a position to take advantage of that work.
  
  Hope that helps
  -steve
  
  
  
• WCF and Windows 2000