Rory is just flat out one of my favorite technical speakers period. If you haven’t had a chance to hear him speak, well, make the effort. And when Rory is talking on a subject of some interest to you that you know little about, do whatever you can within the confines of the law (or maybe a little outside of the law) to make sure you don’t miss it.

WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) (formerly ‘Indigo’) is part of the .NET framework 3.0 (formerly ‘WinFX’, thanks for confusing the heck out of me Microsoft). Basically, it’s all those old APIs that dealt with communications gathered into one nice easily accessed and elegant API.

Watching Rory throw together a quick demo using 3 different communications methods (TCP, Named Pipe and HTTP) was pretty breathtaking. The first one you were like, ok, so you had to do that this and that and suddenly you can transfer text between two applications. Yeah, neat. But then, you saw him do it using the next communication method and guess what? YOU DO IT THE EXACT SAME WAY! That’s right. If you can setup a communication using HTTP, you can setup a communication using TCP. That just rocked.

I haven’t played with Indigo (I mean WCF) yet, but watching Rory’s sample application quickly come together was enough to make me think I need to start doing some playing.

All in all, some pretty exciting stuff for developers coming from Microsoft. If you’ve ever experienced the headache of remoting, be happy because your relief is coming very soon (just how soon is that Rory?)