What is needed to either support WCF on Win2k, or at least minimize the effort in supporting remote communication with Win2k servers via .Net?
Background:
A product I’m working on has a legacy .NET remoting implementation that has been largely replaced by the WCF for new development. The legacy implementation is used as a fall-back for communication with servers running older versions prior to our WCF implementation.
Sales has asked for Win2k support which leaves dev in somewhat of a pickle as .NET 3.0 (and therefore presumably WCF) is not supported on Win2k. We want to support Win2k with a minimum of extra development effort, but it seems that to support Win2k we must implement the interfaces twice; once for remoting with legacy servers and once for WCF.
The closest you’ll get on W2K is WSE3 – this gives you MTOM (etc) over SOAP – but not the full WCF goodness.
You could design the service to be WCF at the server, but WSEx at the client? Not “free”, but I’m assured by several WCF experts that it is very “doable” – WCF was designed to support standards, after all. You’ll have to limit yourself to http-basic, but IMO that should be the default anyway.
Jimmy has an article on this here: Interoperability between WCF and WSE 3.0 (scroll down to “WSE 3.0 to WCF”).