I'm not Craig, but here are a few of my impressions after going over WCF for the last few days:

>Have you been testing WCF? What's your opinion of it?

I just started with it and overall it seems very nice! One thing I noticed for client applications is that performance - especially startup performance is much better.

What I like is that they did a pretty good job basically providing the same functionality that ASMX service support did with the Web Service client wizard and the server wizards, so it's only marginally more difficult to set up services and call them than it is with the ASMX tools. Especially on the client side the process is nearly identical, but you get the full support of WCF so you can switch to other communication modes simply by switching the service class. That's pretty cool!

But ontop of that the proxies are more flexible - you can map them to anything and the proxies generated finally generate properties instead of fields...

Obviously there's even more under the hood that I haven't looked at - support for all the WS standards (fairly transparently), security, transactions - etc. It's pretty impressive that they've got all these different technologies bundled into one fairly consistent interface...


I think WCF is kind of a no-brainer going forward with Web Services (and any kind of app to app communication in general) in .NET...

+++ Rick ---