People keep asking me: now that WinFX and therefore WCF is available for all major platofrms like Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows Vista (and of course for Windows Codename 'Longhorn Server'), why the heck should I as a developer (or my project for that matter) move away from my existing and mature platforms on to Vista?
Isn't it all the same for me as a WCF guy?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: ...
There are quite a few features that are not available on the so called 'down level' platforms ;) These are the ones that come to mind mind. Please feel free to comment on any other additional ones!
- Maybe the major feature for WCF apps on Vista is the Windows Activation Service (WAS). To learn a bit more on WAS, feel free to read some of my friend Steve's posts.
- The next major one, in my eyes, is the improvements to MSMQ. I think they will call it MSMQ 4.0.
- Poison message handling
- Application-specific dead letter queues; in current MSMQ versions there are only system-wide dead letter queues
- Transactional reads from remote queues
The first two of them are reflected in extensions and configuration switches in WCF's MSMQ channel. - Then there are some features related to transactional programming. Vista has Transactional NTFS, Transactional Registry and the Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM). Usually developers do not face them directly but rather use them through leveraging the powerful features of System.Transactions
- Common Log File System (CLFS) is also Vista-only. Managed code developers can access it through the System.IO.Log namespace.
hey christian, CLFS is already included in W2K3 R2. dominick
Posted by: dominick | 01/07/2006 at 07:03 PM
MSMQ 4.0 - message size 4MB - get the remote queue properties
Posted by: Roman Kiss | 01/15/2006 at 11:21 AM