Upgrade WCF to gRPC
WCF Isn’t Coming to .NET 6. But Your Application Can!
Visual ReCode will take all the important business logic from your WCF services and migrate it to a brand-new .NET 6 gRPC solution quickly and easily.
ReCode can migrate most types of WCF application, from basic SOAP-over-HTTP to advanced Duplex services with two-way communication between client and server. Everything is migrated to standard gRPC services, using the Microsoft-supported grpc-dotnet framework for ASP.NET Core.
Once you’ve ReCoded your application you don’t need Visual ReCode around to compile it, modify it, or deploy - because everything’s using the native .NET Core implementations, just like a clean sheet implementation. It doesn’t add any runtime components, compatibility “shims” or proprietary packages: all the code is right there in the solution for you to start working with.
Why You Need To Upgrade
The most recent version of .NET platform is .NET 6, built off of .NET Core. While some .NET Framework technologies were ported over, WCF was not one of them, and there are no plans to change that. This means developers who continue to use WCF are stuck using a version of .NET that is no longer being innovated. Using the best version of .NET possible requires a switch.
Even if WCF worked on the new .NET, it would not be the right solution for modern distributed system development.
WCF was originally released as part of .NET Framework 3.0 at the end of 2006. The world of distributed systems was very different then: JSON was barely a thing, and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) using XML-serialized SOAP messages was the prevailing standard for Service Oriented Architectures. The term “microservices” would not be coined for another five years. Technology moves forward ever-faster, so in the years since WCF was conceived, people have come up with better solutions to the problems it sought to solve.
Where does that leave you and many others that have a deep investment in WCF for building your critical applications?
You’re not stuck in the past with .NET Framework; Visual ReCode can launch you forward with a new .NET Core or .NET 6 implementation based on the latest distributed systems thinking!
ReCode from WCF to gRPC
The best alternative (as recommended by Microsoft) for organizations looking for a migration path away from WCF on .NET Framework is gRPC: a low-overhead, high-performance, cross-platform RPC framework. The ASP.NET Core team has built first-class support for gRPC into ASP.NET Core 3.1. For .NET 5 and .NET 6, Microsoft worked hard to make it the fastest of all gRPC implementations, including C++ and Go.
Visual ReCode Will:
- upgrade and rewrite your existing WCF application code to gRPC automatically
- create new ASP.NET Core gRPC Service projects that match your existing project
- generate gRPC
.protointerface definition files from WCFServiceContractandDataContracttypes - convert
ServiceContractimplementations to gRPC service implementations
Of course, there’s more to your application than just its service contracts - so ReCode will find and copy dependencies from your WCF project(s) to a new .NET Core or .NET 6 native project structure for you.