Can WCF work on Win2k?

Question

What is needed to support WCF in Win2k, or at least minimize efforts to support remote communication with Win2k servers via .Net?

History:

The product I'm working on has an outdated .NET remoting implementation, which is largely replaced by WCF for new development. The inherited implementation is used as a recession to communicate with servers running on older versions prior to our WCF implementation.

Sales asked for Win2k support, which leaves Dev in some brine, since .NET 3.0 (and therefore presumably WCF) is not supported on Win2k. We want to support Win2k with minimal additional development efforts, but it seems that to support Win2k we need to implement interfaces twice; once for remote access to old servers and once for WCF.

Answer 1

The closest thing you will get to W2K is WSE3 - this gives you MTOM (etc.) on top of SOAP, but not the full completeness of WCF.

Can you create a WCF service on the server, but WSEx on the client? Not “free”, but some WCF experts say it’s very “doable” - WCF was designed to support standards. You will have to limit yourself to http-basic, but IMO, which should be the default by default.

Jimmy has an article about it here: Interaction between WCF and WSE 3.0 (scroll down to "WSE 3.0 to WCF").

Answer 2

Windows 2000 will only work with .Net 2.0 and earlier. WCF requires 3.0 or later. Many 3.x applications can be recompiled for the target runtime 2.0, but if you use any of the extensions (WCF, WF, WPF) you should always have 3.x installed in the complete databases.

So no.

In addition, expanded support for Windows 2000, including security updates, ends in just over 13 months. If someone wants to use Windows 2000 for the date that their own business. But the consequences for you with this date, you can never know for sure whether there is actually a problem, what you can solve, or if your client server was simply infected with malware. Providing support in this scenario is difficult at best.

Answer 3

As others have said, you cannot run WCF on Windows 2000. However, you do not have to.

Honestly, it is not practical to require your end users to install the Win2003 server to work only with your WCF services. Your customers can leave their Windows 2000 infrastructure in place and simply start the Win2K3 server (or even a virtual machine), which simply starts the service. The license for the Windows 2003 Web is about $ 300, and it does not require a huge machine to operate, so it is relatively economical.