I've recently encountered a couple people giving some advice that I think is nonsense. One of them is a Microsoft employee and the other is a contractor here at my work place... I found the advice as an overzealousness to sell people on a new technology without looking at the sense or nonsense of the technology...
So here's the deal my buddy and architect (who has in the past been maligned by me here in hopefully good humor) ran into a discussion and was venting for quite sometime a few days ago. He was talking to an MS Rep (about an project that will live entirely within my company's network); The Rep was espousing how wonderful web services are and that Indigo was going to be just like them (I'm over simplifying here). He said that web services are easy to build much easier than remoting, and on top of that they are loosely typed... to which my friend cited 2 things:
1) "Loosely-typed" Acck... what are you nuts! I don't want to go back to Scripting languages... I like .Net because everything can be strongly typed.. plus you're talking about an INTERNAL Project.
2) IIS on every server that I possess is just fundamentally a flawed idea from a security perspective
Next came my experience with the contractor.. similar situation.. I have something internal that is barfing all over itself and it needs help... it's an old ASP process so I'm trying to figure out the best solution for a .Net version of the code... So the contractor overheard me and started espousing the same ideas.
Is it me or does no one else see that web services and IIS everywhere is not necessarily the best idea. In particular consider that if you have to load IIS every place you want to distribute some process, then the next time there is a hole in IIS that gets found it's possible that someone could just about 0wn ur nt1r3 n3tw0r|< (for those who don't speak hacker.. that means "own your entire network").
I like the ideas of SOA, but they are not for everywhere... outside the network or where you have all kinds of different types of clients (read Java and .Net) sure it makes perfect sense.. inside your network... Are you nuts! Learn remoting... it requires a bit more work, but in the long run you should be a little safer.