Depreciating the SOAP formatter
Well, I hate to say they “they told us so.” But they did. A shot has been taken across the bow of Remoting with SOAP. It's interesting to see how the camps are dividing up. There's a lot folks (notably MS employees and the influentials) that are cheering this. Then there others who've got a lot to lose with it railing against it, like Dale Brenner:
Such a move essentially destroys my investment, and give great creedance to the open source argument.Every day I battle those folks who advocate open source. How do I maintain any credibility with my customers, if it appears that you willing to arbitrarily deimplement critical features... To be clear, the move you are contemplating would go a long way toward driving me out of business.
While I couldn't really give a bee's knee about this issue personally (I abandonned Remoting altogether after PDC), I think it says something that Microsoft is willing to put a stake in the group in such a public forum and see what the feedback is. Now seems like a good time to say “2.0 is last iteration of it“ and then be done with it, though.
Let's be fair to MS here too: What prevents an OSS project team from depreciating feature? Sure, with OSS you can still with an old version all you like and try to work around its issues and spend your own effort trying to keep up with the base product if you like. Do mod_log_referer and mod_log_agent ring any bells? The situation with .NET isn't that different provided the OS allows you run different runtimes side-by-side. Of course with .NET, your code should just keep working.
I think more importantly though, such a move gives Indigo more urgency. It seems like something better than remoting and ASMX and we need it before Longhorn ships.