I want to create a web app. I want to use WCF for distributed transactions, ASP.NET at the middle, and because Flash is so popular, I want to write the front end with Flex3.
Does that sound like a good architecture to you ? are there any benefits including WCF ?
Can Flex interact nicely with ASP.NET ? or should I go Silverlight ?
Look into a tool to handle communications between .NET and Flex, such as WebORB. You can use webservices, but it's faster to use the flash AMF format to move data to the client.
Absolutely, I find the integration between WCF Services (using basicHTTPBinding) and Flex to be fantastic. I've been using it for a year or so now, and have been really pleased with the results.
The benefits to using WCF, to the extent you can get your head around it (I chose Juval Lowy's look Programming WCF Services to help me with that process, which I'd recommend if you aren't already familiar with it, since it's definitely got its own idiom), are numerous, but for me, it's mainly meant (a) not having to deal with serialization issues and (b) writing very little code. Essentially, I define my types and the functions I want to expose as Web interfaces, and WCF takes care of the rest. Flex's WebService class works splendidly with it. You don't need any third-party software systems to handle connecting the two -- just spend a little time learning WCF, and you can do the work yourself.
It reminds me I should post an example on my blog showing just how simple it is to do this. I'll post back with an update if I do. Meantime feel free to post with comments if you have questions. Best of luck!
Use either:
for server-side interface or Asp.net MVC that won't have any views.