How does .NET 5 deal with SOA?
WCF technology has not been ported to .NET 5 and there are no plans to perform a complete port of it. Instead, Microsoft is investing in gRPC, Google's open source technology. Besides, .NET 5 has excellent support for REST services through ASP.NET Core.
The main reasons behind the decision to abandon WCF in .NET 5 are as follows:
- As we have already discussed, SOAP technology has been overtaken by REST technology in most application areas.
- WCF technology is strictly tied to Windows, so it would be very expensive to reimplement all its features from scratch in .NET 5. Since support for full .NET will continue, users that need WCF can still rely on it.
- As a general strategy, with .NET 5, Microsoft prefers investing in open source technologies that can be shared with other competitors. That is why, instead of investing in WCF, Microsoft provided a gRPC implementation starting from .NET Core 3.0.
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