With a wealth of experience spanning back to his involvement on the .NET advisory council and more recently with the Windows Communication Foundation (formally known as Indigo) strategic design review, it's with little surprise that IDesign founder, Juval Lowy, is considered one of the world's top experts in all things .NET.

As a Microsoft Software Legend and Microsoft's Regional Director for Silicon Valley, Lowy is now taking his vast knowledge around the world in a series of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Master Classes to share his expertise on building secure, reliable and interoperable service-oriented applications.

Before he arrives in Australia to host his WCF Master Class as part of Readify's next Industrial Strength Series, Lowy took some time out to share his thoughts on the changing landscape of software development and its future with Mitchell Bingemann.

What can attendees expect to get out of your WCF Master classes?

My objective is not just to make the students WCF experts, but also take them to the next level as software engineers, to enable educated decisions on aligning roadmaps with WCF and to assess benefits and advantages. I share best practices, pitfalls, tips and design guidelines, as well as my original techniques and breakthroughs.

What advantages does WCF offer over other frameworks?

WCF is Microsoft's implementation of a set of industry standards defining service interactions. WCF unifies the previous generations of Microsoft's technologies, offering the interoperability of ASP.NET web services, the extensibility of remoting and the productivity and power of Enterprise Services. There is just a ton of off-the-shelf plumbing to use, something nothing else offers over standards.

What makes WCF a good platform for developing service-oriented applications?

It is designed from the ground up for that. You cannot tack it on things like raw .NET or Windows SOA - they are just unaware of it. WCF enforces many of the SOA tenets, and enables the rest. It is deliberately different from classic .NET - there is no type sharing, it is all based on message exchange, and it supports most of the industry WS standards that facilitates services interoperability. Not only that, there is a ton of built-in plumbing that do all the hard work for you.