Should I use ASMX or not?!
I think it's fair to say that I'm one of the unwashed masses that Steve Maine refers to in his article on contract-first is not the same as WSDL-first (no offence taken) so I don't have anything technical to add but I am currently reading this and related info with great interest. I've been feeling really misled by the original hype about how ASMX was supposed to enable the building of solutions in a distributed architecture, without having to leave the comfortable surroundings of coding .Net classes and methods.
I'm currently developing just in an intranet environment so having tried to 'do the right thing' and make use of Web Services for anything I might want to re-use in a number of client applications I've met with alot of grief. I quickly realised that starting from my object model in .Net code and then trying to squeeze that structure and logic through the WSDL pipeline to a client at the other end, lots of 'stuff' gets lost, and as Will Provost makes clear, this is also a problem in other environments such as Java.
I was thinking I might have to resort to .Net Remoting instead which didnt look like it was going to be any easier at first glance, but then I started reading Christian Weyer's posts on how he has crafted a Visual Studio .Net Add-In to make the WSDL/XSD-first approach much easier.
Thanks Christian, I'll give it a try!
[UPDATE]
March 8 2005
The debate is growing:
Should Developers Be Forced To Learn WSDL?