On the way to work this morning I was listening to an ARCast show hosted by Ron Jacobs who was interviewing Marc Mercuri about WF, WCF and Cardspace. This session doesn’t really talk about anything revolutionary, but it does highlight some of the features available in both the .NET v2 & v3 frameworks. In particular they talk about the consumption of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) by .NET Compact Framework applications. Since v1 the .NET CF has been able to consume web services. This means that by exposing a WCF service using the basic profile it can be consumed by a mobile application.
This raises an interesting point about working with WCF when building occasionally connected applications. The spin from Microsoft focuses on the developer specifying the “C” (ie Contract) of WCF, leaving the “A” & “B” (ie Address and Binding) to be configured on deployment. This approach is great, but the developer needs to consider network performance and availability in determining which binding should be used. This comes back to building applications where the user doesn’t care if it’s on or offline.