Should I wait for a new version of WCF or should I start learning WCF 3.5 ?

Question

I want to start learning WCF, but I don’t want to realize that by the time I've learn it, that I will have to do it all over again by the arrival of .NET 4.0

So will the upcoming WCF only have some minor changes, which someone familiar with older version of WCF will have no troubles learning in a short amount of time, or will I again have to re-learn much about WCF?

bye

Answer 1

Start learning now, you have a lot to gain by doing so since the core of WCF is not going to change. Also, you have to start somewhere - it might as well be now.

Being a software developer is all about being agile and adaptive to your surroundings. You need to be able to learn a technology and grow with it as that technology changes. The best thing to do is to learn everything you can now and worry about the next version when it comes out.

Answer 2

WCF 4.0 (which should be out with .NET 4.0 / VS 2010 before the end of 2010) will be an evolutionary extension of today's WCF 3.5 - you loose nothing by starting to learn WCF now - and there's quite a bit to learn indeed!

WCF 4.0 will make a few things easier - but nonetheless, it doesn't hurt to understand how these things work now, and how they've been simplified for WCF 4.0.

So there's really no reason to wait - go ahead and start learning!

Marc

Answer 3

As a rule, it's generally not a bad thing to learn about a technology even if it's going to change drastically. It's nice to have a point of reference about these kinds of things.

I've been using WCF in .NET 4.0 and I can tell you that not much has changed. There are a number of under-the-hood changes that won't affect you, but here's a few of the things that you might keep in mind as you are learning that are going to change:

• Configuration has been simplified a bit (but in my experience, not that much).
• ReceiveContext that will make transactional receives from things like MSMQ easier (if you do this, you know why this is important).
• Big improvements to support RESTful services and how DataContracts work in the context of an HTTPRequest.
• WS-Discovery support (read more here)
• A Routing Service for doing routing/multicasting of messages
• Support for the new Windows Workflow Foundation bits (they completely re-wrote WF)
• Tracing now uses native ETW, so should be faster. (This is a great change).

That's it. The programming model is left relatively untouched. The configuration looks to be 99% backwards compatible. Learning now won't hurt you later here - only give you a better foundation for when 4.0 does arrive.

You can read a little more here (most of my points are from here): http://www.aspnetpro.com/articles/2009/04/asp200904mb_f/asp200904mb_f.asp