I came to WCF thru work after its heyday and never used it in any complicated scenarios. In the mid-2010s I used WCF in a set of WPF apps to exchange information across applications (it worked but later I added better drag and drop and the WCF based exchange was dropped), created an over built service that was never used (the library code was used directly) and in the late 2010s I wrote a backend for a Xamarin Forms Android App (still in production). These days I maintain several WCF services and while it is a little odd not to see REST calls and JSON these services mostly 'just work'. I can't speak to the experience of working with WCF in security heavy environments with complex business driven requirements - but by the time I used WCF the tech, tooling and help were quite mature and creating an internal service to exchange .NET objects was incredibly easy.

For better or worse full WCF support wasn't added to .NET Core - not a complete surprise but an incredibly painful detail (much like edmx...) in the effort to move existing Framework code to .NET Core!

So seeing the preview releases of 1.0 from the opensource CoreWCF Project project made me feel excited and grateful!!! I'm barely getting started with it but have already been able to get a test version of an old service running in a sort of 'hello world' way and have used the dotnet-svcutil to generate a client from the published metadata (if you tried CoreWCF earlier you likely found metadata publishing missing - it is now included!). Early days but I'm crossing my fingers this will be one more set of projects that can more to .NET Core!

.NET 7.0 - With preview 3 released it seemed like time to jump in so I moved the Pointless Waymarks Project to .NET 7 and LangVersion preview. Tests pass and I'm writing this from a .NET 7 build so things appear to be working... This move was made easier by finding out about Directory.Build.props which lets you specify properties for all projects via a single file.

I met up with a photographer friend recently and got to see some of his workflow for processing images on the computer. It was inspiring and one thing it made me do is look around at additional tools. For years I have been reluctant to use tools outside of Lightroom. Partly because with my photography I could usually get 98-99% of the results I cared about in Lightroom - but also because for me processing photos is only part of the challenge... It turns out cataloging, keeping track of, finding and searching decades of photos is probably just as important as the processing! So the various things I have done over the years that have taken photos outside of Lightroom have occasionally made the cataloging very painful - eventually I settled comfortably into 'just Lightroom'.

From a look thru photo processing tools this round what seems to be sticking with me is DxO PureRAW. Basically at for-me-normal viewing sizes the results are not always impressive - but zoom in and I am finding that the denoising and sharpening DxO PureRAW is applying to distant details in landscape photos really might be worth paying for...