Hello World, Part 1

Hey everybody, I'm Dr. Nicholas Allen, and I'm a Program Manager at Microsoft on the Windows Communication Foundation team (formerly known by the much hipper name 'Indigo').  For those of you that don't know what a PM does, check out the very extensive description by Steven Sinofsky, which talks about the different kinds and roles of PMs here at Microsoft.  In short though, I make sure that WCF has the right features at the right quality for my particular feature area.

That's a pretty open-ended job description because delivering a platform library like WCF involves a lot more than just giving you some assemblies to run.  We have a commitment to provide you with the extensibility, usability, and documentation that lets you build applications on top of our platform that we've never even dreamed of.  Microsoft is serious about making WCF the platform of the future that you can pick up and use whenever you need to make two programs talk to each other.  There's a real challenge to provide powerful, well-thought out APIs that you can use in your applications today, and that you'll still be using 10 years from now.

Over the next several weeks I'll be doing a deep-dive into the heart of the WCF technology stack.  The features that I work on are the transports and channels all the way down at the bottom of the stack.  Two people down here with me are Yasser Shohoud and Kenny Wolf so check out their blogs as well.  There's going to be a little bit of topic duplication between us, but I hope you're going to find all of our perspectives interesting.  Right now it's hard to find technical details about what happens in the guts of WCF and we're going to change that.

Now hopefully, most people aren't going to need to know a lot of details about the technology at this level.  We want the IT professional to build business applications without having to worry at all about how we sling bits around.  However, every WCF message ultimately goes through channels and out through a transport.  If we could somehow turn off these interfaces so that they no longer worked, then everything would grind to halt.  As you can imagine, these classes also form a very important integration point whenever you want to build an application that goes beyond our core scenarios.

This week I'll concentrate on some lighter topics before focusing on the technical details of WCF.

Next time: Windows Communication Foundation Big Picture