How to promote WCF to a non-techie?

Question

How would you describe and promote WCF as a technology to a non-technical client/manager/CEO/etc?

What are competing solutions or ideas that they might bring up(such as those they read about in their magazines touting new technology)?

What is WCF not good for that you've seen people try to shoehorn it into?

Answer 1

In a single sentence, I'd say that WCF is "software that lets you set up and manage communication between systems a lot more efficiently than in the past".

I can see them bringing up BizTalk as a competitor, but of course you could say that WCF works with it and is in fact used as base technology for it in the more recent versions.

I'm not sure if I can think of any inappropriate shoe-horning of WCF that I have seen, although there are plenty of legacy apps that will probably be "upgraded" to WCF that don't really need to be for any real business reason.

Answer 2

There is an inter-op angle as well. If you upgrade your Asmx services to WCF services you can still honor your asmx clients and then start moving forward with newer WCF clients. WCF is starting to get some ReST attention, RSS is there, Silverlight has a place with WCF. Performance is better, depending on the bindings you choose. One of the big draw backs is a steeper learning curve comapred to Asmx services, the great power/great responsibilty problem and then the 101 ways to do the same thing.

None of this is CxO talk but refactor the language into magazine buzz words so that they can see the future of this technology.

Answer 3

Tell them it'll let you do your job easier which translates into less time and less money.

Answer 4

Can you add a little bit of info on what you mean by 'lot more efficiently'?

Is this lower bandwidth, lower server utilization, less development time or ???

Are there any metrics I can use to back this up, or comparative analysis with ASMX and other options?

I realize there aren't any real competitors out there (it's just a new technology) but can you give me an idea of how it compares to rolling your own communications, and what exactly it improves?

Answer 5

Comparing with .asmx: WCF is the next generation of Microsoft's Web service development platform, which addresses many of the issues with older versions, specifically:

• better interoperation, so you can interoperate with Web services that aren't from Microsoft or that are published on the Internet
• much more flexible, so it's easier and faster for developers to get their jobs done
• easier to configure without changing code, reducing the cost of maintenance significantly

It may be that they raise the question of how it relates to SOA, a "service-oriented architecture". WCF is the Microsoft solution for creating applications that participate in these distributed systems.