WCF on Linux - is it worth the effort

Question

Hello all.

This is my first question here, so please don't shoot.

I've been playing with Linux recently (Ubuntu 9.04 and openSUSE 11.1) with focus on web services. The simple Hello World web service (as described on mono-project.com) works fine. Now I need to step into the wonderful world of WCF (I'm familiar with the concept). And I'm stuck. I've installed MonoDevelop and mono-wcf package (including all the dependencies) and as you can assume I can't write simple WCF server (well, I can write it, it just won't compile). I'm missing some references which I can't find: The type or namespace name 'ServiceModel' does not exist... and when I add System.ServiceModel reference (for which I have to change to Moonlight/Silverlight project type or I don't even see it in Packages) I get: The type or namespace name 'ServiceHost' does not exist, and I just don't know where it is.

What am I doing wrong? The same code compiles and runs fine on Windows (VS2008).

Please help. And still don't shoot.

Answer 1

Although there is work currently being put into WCF on Mono (mainly around the parts of WCF that are included in Silverlight), the WCF stack is largely incomplete. My impression is that only the most basic of operations are functional.

Regular web services, on the other hand, should be fully funtional.