What are the benefits of migrating our application over to WCF as opposed to continuing to use .NET Remoting?

Question

Alright, so I've asked several questions on StackOverflow about .NET Remoting, and there is always at least one person who just has to chime in, ".NET Remoting is deprecated, use WCF instead." I understand that it's deprecated and there is no guarantee of future support with new versions of the .NET Framework. But what are some other good reasons we would want to move over to WCF? I have seen a few mostly minor annoyances with .NET Remoting, however, this is not enough to change the minds the powers that be who believe firmly in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". At this time, the only reason that attitude will change is if .NET Remoting is removed from a future version of the .NET Framework, so who knows how long that will be?

Does anybody have any insight as why exactly WCF is "better" than .NET Remoting, or why Remoting is inferior to WCF? What are the pros and cons of each technology? Are there additional things you can do with WCF and not with Remoting?

I mean, it would be great if I could convince them to let us migrate our software over to WCF just to allow a configurable TcpChannel timeout to be set on the client side (this seems to have been broken for a while, no matter what steps or troubleshooting I try), and when this happens, it makes our software look like absolute shite.

Thanks in advance for helping to shed some light on this.

Answer 1

There are plenty of reasons to ditch remoting; a few might include:

• lack of transport flexibility
• versioning requirements are huge pain
• platform dependent (no sensible chance of cross-platform usage)
• no chance of usage from the growing mobile market
• lack of future development: whatever feature you want added - it won't be

however, I would disagree that WCF is the automatic replacement; WCF itself is a pretty versatile tool, but can be pretty complex, and has restrictions of its own. I haven't used it myself, but I have seen lots of praise for Service Stack, essentially with users describing it as "WCF done right", i.e. the good bits of WCF, without the pain points. However, there are plenty of other options too. One nice thing about the idea of Service Stack, though, is that it iterates pretty quickly, and if it lacks something you want you can change it.