This is the first in a series of posts to document Amazing Alex Weinert's COM308 talk on building manageable services with the Windows Communication Foundation. 

An important impetus for the adoption of service orientation is the prospect of an information services infrastructure comprised of readily-manageable units.  Furthermore, in envisaging that more-manageable infrastructure, what people see is not merely that the units can be more easily administered as software entities by system administrators, but also that they can be properly administered as components of a business enterprise, as budget line-items.  The construction of software is an expensive undertaking that is almost always for the purpose of either making money or saving money.  A reason that investing in software is viewed with increasing skepticism is that the costs of building software are always readily apparent, but the returns on the investment are much less so.  Software services are supposed to software entities of which the costs are more controllable and the returns more tangible.  Indeed, ideally a software service is supposed to be an entity of which the costs of operation and the level of service are known and controlled exactly, and which can not only be composed together into larger systems of which the costs and reliability are also known precisely, but something of which the consumption can also be sold. 

The Windows Communication Foundation responds to the demand for software that is more easily administered as information technology and as budget line-items in two ways.  First, it provides an admirable variety of tools for systems administrators to use to manage Windows Communication Foundation solutions.  (Did I say "admirable?"  Hell, what I mean to say is THE WINDOWS COMMUNICATION FOUNDATION HAS THE RICHEST SET OF MANAGEMENT TOOLS OF ANY DEVELOPER FOCUSED TECHNOLOGY EV-AH, AND IS THE FIRST TO MASSIVELY DELIVER ON THE PROMISE OF SOFTWARE SERVICES BEING MORE MANAGEABLE.)  Second, it allows developers to easily augment those tools for systems administrators, and also to add facilities that will be unique to each business enterprise, by which business administrators can monitor costs, risks and returns. 

The next several posts will show the code from the COM308 demo to illustrate how to leverage these ten options in your own applications.