Any viable alternatives to WCF and WSDL for integration endpoints?

Question

My employer is a software vendor for a specific market. Our customers integrate our system with others using web services. We use Microsoft technology, and our web services are implemented in ASP.NET and WCF.

The time has come to review our current set of services, and come up with company standards for future integrations. I am reading "Enterprise Integration Patterns," and I've also been looking a little bit at nServiceBus and Mass Transit. These may simplify issues like contract versioning and unit testing, but they seem to be most useful for providing an internal service bus, not for exposing services to external clients.

Our customers are on many different platforms, and require our services to be standards compliant. That may mean different things to different people, but I think it is safe to assume that they want to access web services described with WSDL.

In this scenario, is WCF the way to go?

Answer 1

WCF is by far the most standards-compliant stack on the Microsoft platform. The nice thing is that it's very flexible for different clients "out of the box", and if there are things that cause you grief, most of them can be changed via custom behaviors without too much trouble.