Ubiquity of WCF

I got kind of excited to see that Silverlight has support for WCF (although I don't know exactly what parts). Having a browser based plugin that can use the WS-* stack, especially WS-Security, is a big deal.

I haven't yet seen the light, REST-wise. Currently, my thinking of what REST is to WS-* pretty much echoes what I think JSON is to XML. That is, it seems like a great idea because it strips out all the complexity, but as soon as you have greater requirements (description of contracts (WSDL), message level security (WS-Security), authentication (WS-Trust), reliable messaging, etc), the complexity starts to creep back in. For your Googles, your del.icio.us's, your Yahoo's, REST is enough. For a bank, probably not.

You could say REST is Reach, and WS-* is Rich.

And of course, my company is building in WS-*. This might colour my judgement a little.

All of this is a reasonably long winded way of saying that it's nice to see an RIA technology that supports WS-*. And to add to the ubiquity of WCF, the .net compact framework 3.5 supports it too. So now I can make WS-Security based web service calls from the desktop, the browser and mobile.