There's a lot of mention by Microsoft that ASMX is more compatible with Indigo than Remoting, even for IPC on the same machine. In the same breath they say that Indigo will be backward compatible to both of them. There are some things I don't understand here I haven't seen addressed by any blogs.
- Aren't both ASMX and Remoting equally dead-ends for services since both are basically RPC structures (i.e. Function Call)
- If Indigo will not look like either ASMX or Remoting, how could either be better. They're both dead ends.
- How can Indigo be message-based across a firewall? The whole point of a firewall is to not allow the server to call back to the client. A message-based system implies call backs.
- Doesn't RPC serve a very useful purpose of eliminating the need for an Ack/Nak protocol? I'd hate to have to build Ack/Nak into every one of my future Web Services.
- Can't we design an ASMX that simulates a message-based system? Isn't asynchronous similar to two one way messages? Couldn't you just define your functions so that there is no out or ref parameters or any return value?
It seems to me that MS is only giving us half the story. Does anyone know the rest?
On my current project, we are working on our software architecture layers. In our discussions, I realized that one reason to go with an MVC model is that Winforms will be passing away. How a business object would map to a Winforms GUI may look very different than how it would map to the Avalon GUI. The Controller pattern could provide the adapter to more easily move from Winforms to Avalon.
Here are some Chris Anderson (and others) comments on MVC and the Command pattern (one that we will need in our design).