Question

I want to buy a book on WCF because I need to develop latex to pdf conversion web service.

The idea is to let the customer submit latex documents (known as input file with .tex extension) to my web site and download the pdf output generated by the server helped by a service behind the scene.

I am new to WCF, so I have no idea, whether WCF can ease my development.

I am also considering the security issues such as protecting the server from any bad input.

Could you give me a suggestion whether or not WCF will suit my need?

EDIT 1: I am confused with choosing only one answer as both Martin’s and Ben’s really help me. Using classic probabilistic approach by throwing a coin, the result is Ben’s. I am sorry.

Answer 1

WCF will neither help nor hinder your effort overmuch – it’s designed to facilitate the actual plumbing of service routing and message handling. The “business logic” (in this case, the latex->pdf conversion) is left to the programmer to implement themselves. For a task with such a simple workflow, WCF would definitely be overkill.

If you had complex authentication requirements, WCF’s security features would help you immensely, after a very steep learning curve. I’d recommend sticking with a simple POST or something. Your question about bad input is, again, outside of the scope of WCF. You’ll have to take care of that in your business logic.

That said, good luck – sounds like a fun project!