XML is ugly and angle brackets are for plumbers. Unless you have a good reason to do so, you shouldn’t have to look at WSDL. Sharing this C# snippet here

[ServiceContract]
interface IHello
{
      [OperationContract]
      string SayHello(string name);
}

is a perfectly reasonable way to share contract between server and client, if you’ll be sticking to Indigo. A service can expose all the WS-MetadataExchange and XSD and WSDL you like so that other Web Service clients can bind to your service, but as long as you stay on the System.ServiceModel level and focus on writing a distributed systems solution instead of writing something that “does XML”, you won’t have to worry about all the goo that goes on in the basement. Staring at WSDL is about as interesting as looking at the output of “midl /Oicf”.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005 11:51:40 PM UTC
What happened to Contract First and all the interoperability stuff?
Thursday, February 10, 2005 1:47:58 AM UTC
Quoting your answer on my Italian weblog:

"In fact ... what I do there is contract first. Just not WSDL."

I understand that the interface in your example is the contract, but it seems to me a contract in a language that not all the involved parties could easily understand, at least in an heterogeneous world.

Or perhaps I'm just too much used to angle brackets and I only need some time to understand the new "language" :-)
Thursday, February 10, 2005 2:21:41 AM UTC
The point is that everybody using the CLR shouldn't worry about the goo all that much and trust that the tooling will get it increasingly better "right" for them and those who are not using the CLR can get an appropriate WSDL generated. The Indigo programming model and the XmlFormatter have the goal to make it harder to generate non-interoperable mess. WSDL is simply just another metadata format, but certainly not "user friendly".
Clemens Vasters
Thursday, February 10, 2005 3:26:46 AM UTC
Thank you very much for the clarification.
Thursday, February 10, 2005 10:51:45 AM UTC
Taking away my XML?! You'll get my XML when you pry it out of my cold, dead Notepad.
Monday, February 14, 2005 1:49:52 PM UTC
Couldn't agree more. Insisting you have to start with XML is like insisting that you should still program in Assembler or IL.
Chris Kinsman
Thursday, March 03, 2005 4:07:48 AM UTC
comments in my blog
Comments are closed.