Ah.. yes, the WCF (Indigo) will be available in the new version of the .NET Compact Framework! Read this blog by Roman to get the latest scoop. And yes, they do listen ;)

OK, I am back to the surface still alive and breathing after been drowned in the sea of project deadlines.

A few important links from this morning news scan:

1. The Indigo CTP documents are available at:

http://winfx.msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/indigo_con/html/503fae4b-014c-44df-a9c7-c76ec4ed4229.asp

And as Sam Gentile righfully mentiones - “Go read, get used to it, it's your future.“

2. Cool project at Codeproject.com:

Implement an explorer using .net compact flamework in Pocket PC

In his recent post Mike Zintel divuldges some information on the past, present and future of evolution of the NetCF and asking some feedback on the priorities for v.Next. As I already pointed out in my previouse post, CF lacks essential support for developing SOA such as WS-* protocol suite or Indigo. So seeing that CF team is thinking on leveraging it is very encoraging sign. The only problem I see here is the timing. Mike mentions this in the context of V3, but we need it now. The project that I am working on is a real time trading system that utilizes desktop as well as CE devices clients. In the case of desktop the usage of WSE is no brainer and fits in the architecture that I designed pretty well. But in case of CE devices I have to go through some loops by utilizing a Web Service in the middle for outgoing messages and a custom UDP communication for incoming. Plus by the time the CF V3 will be coming out the Indigo should be available so it would make sence to implement Indigo for CF V3 as well. How about if CF team would release a WS-* for CF as and add-on not tied up to V3, but may be to some Service Pack for v2 of CF and provided a full support for Indigo in the V3. I think this should be a feasable option since MS already has the WSE in the v2.0 which is pretty stable and shouldn't pose a lot problems when porting the code to CF v2.

Everybody has been talking about Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) lately. And it’s not about Web Services, but essentially about service been abstracted from the implementation, published specs of its interface and a formal contract between service provider and its customer.  So, mostly it is about standards in the communication between different platforms and systems – this is where SOAP, WSE (Indigo in the future) come to play. It’s all nice and dandy when you develop SOA systems for desktops/servers, but we’d immediately step into uncharted territory if you try to apply SOA principals when developing for mobile devices. Yes, we can call to Web Services from .NET CF client, we can even communicate with servers which implement WSE (big thanks to Casey for his wonderful work here), but you’d fall short if your project should require a 2 way real-time communication with a desktops or other devices in the almost always connected (WIFI) environment. So this rant is to bring attention of Microsoft folks on this very important subject. Mobile devices are not only used in the end-user retail environment, but also in the enterprise. We need WSE or Indigo for mobile devices.