WCF targets the .NET Core framework which is designed to support multiple computer architectures and to run cross-platform. Right now the WCF project builds on Windows, but .NET Core offers the potential for it to run on OS X and Linux. The WCF team are working hard to make this a reality and to keep up to date as platform support for .NET Core grows, but if you want to help I know they would love contributions especially around improving and testing the platform support.
It took me a little while to figure it out, but I think the headline should read “WCF is now open source”. ;^)
Ideally it would have been “Windows Communication Foundation is now open source” so those of us who are not familiar with everything .NET know what they miss if they read on.
I have a love/hate relationship with WCF. I’m not overly happy it will be inflicted on multiple platforms…Service Stack was a lot friendlier till it became a closed source product, though I guess the last open version is still usable in hobbyist projects. I didn’t look to see if anyone continued open development on it.
I know it’s wishful thinking, but maybe WPF is next?
WPF is not too interesting, it’s locked to Windows and DirectX. It’s the server side stack that Microsoft is heavily pushing to be cross platform.
On client side, web stack pretty much won already.
Even if this wasn’t completely unrealistic due to WPF’s deep (legacy) Windows dependencies, I would still say noooo! WPF is one of the most obtuse UI frameworks I have ever had to develop for. Powerful yes. But also incredibly annoying, with poor support for hand-written XML, a hundred potential pitfalls and a learning curve like a brick wall. Yes XAML is declarative and human-readable, which is a good bit better than many other solutions, but it’s XML which is already verbose to begin with, and they make you spell out your entire class structure within the XML, including simple things like data bindings, which quickly becomes a big, ugly mess. IMHO/YMMV.
P.S. Yes I know that WinRT uses XAML too. And it’s no surprise to me that many developers would rather recompile their stuff from other platforms than develop using WinRT.
Edited 2015-05-22 12:59 UTC
From what I understand I thought Microsoft were slowly deprecating it in favourite of XAML which so I guess the argument they have is that the resources are better spent on future frameworks than going through deprecated frameworks then opening them up.