When Microsoft announced the technology that is now known as WCF, there was a lot of expectation and some skepticism. Expectation because it sounded great and would help us solve so many problems and realize so many things that were then very hard to make happen. Skepticism because it sounded great and would help us solve so many problems and realize so many things that were then very hard to make happen...

It turns out that we are somewhere in the middle. The technology has arrived as evidenced by our issue this month, with in-depth how-to articles such as "Creating Custom WCF Behaviors" by Rob Daigneau. The problem is that the tools are lagging. When Web services hit the scene, they were a firestorm of success for two very important reasons. First they solved a problem that needed solving and that everyone understood. In this case WCF also hits the mark, though less forcefully, since we do still have Web services, just not as feature rich as WCF. The second thing that made Web services such a superstar technology is that the tools for making the simple cases work were brain-dead simple: you ran a wizard and got a functional, usable Web service. You could then customize and add and whatever, but it worked for hello world and it let you get a proof of concept done in nothing flat. This is the big weakness we are currently seeing with WCF at the moment. Tools are lacking, and simple things take a lot of steps to make happen. I remember people scoffing at IBM's first Web services that tried to compete with the .NET Web services. The thing that beat down IBM was that it took a dozen or more steps to make a simple example work. WCF isn't that far gone, but complexity does rise very quickly.

Don't get me wrong. I think WCF is a huge enabler. It has made products like CardSpace easier to implement, but I just hope that the tools follow that actually bring this cool and powerful technology to the masses of developers who don't have the time to dig in the guts for weeks just to make practical use of it.