Folks, I'm pleased to see that other people here are irritated by the number of choices we have for communication and by the complexity of WCF. I was also pleased to see someone else was bewlidered by having WebAPI buried inside MVC and found a way of starting with a managable skeleton project.
Luckily I can delay my confusion over using WCF or whatever else is trendy this week, as the core working code of my service is actually inside a neutral DLL. I can write and test this code totally independly of how it will be published, then later I can wrap it in thin code to publish it in whatever ways I want. That will give me time to fiddle around with Web API. Overall though, I'm getting utterly fed-up with the number of technologies, kits, standards, languages, scripts, dependencies, conventions, platforms, etc. Every month I get the MSDN magazine posted to me and I dread opening it to see how many dozen new acronymns have been invented and discover how all of my old apps are obsolete because there is a new and better things to do it. I must be getting old too, as I pine for the previous decades of programming where there was less choice and everything just goddamn worked and was documented. Now I spend whole days futzing around to try something out or desperately searching the Internet for clues on an incomprehensible errors. There was a time when you could feel good as being a well-rounded programmer with good general knowledge. These days it's practically impossible to be well-rounded in every significant aspect of programming without experimenting and studying 18 hours every day and skipping eating and bathing. It's like trying to understand every working part of a Jumbo Jet. Instead of converging and stabilising in modern times, software development is disintegrating into a jumble of parts, of which many are nearly duplicated, conflicting, poorly documented, unstable, overly-complex, inter-dependent and multi-versioned. I'm finding that the joy of computer programming is being sucked out of me week by week. The thing that sh*ts me most is what came out of the discussion weeks ago about how there is no single reliable way of writing multi-platform software. To do that you have to be boffin of C#, C, C++, JavaScript, Java and all of their supporting kits. Oh well, back to Silverlight 4 coding this morning ... and that's nearly obsolete already!! Greg
