WS DevCon: Sam Ruby: ?Interop is All?
Chris and Tim could not have picked a more appropriate keynote ? the ideas from Sam?s talk resonated in most of the presentations that followed.

The key take-away: Do NOT use SOAP is you always control both ends of the wire in a distributed system. The ONLY reason you want to use SOAP is to assure interoperability with other SOAP end-points (web services and clients). 

Sam points out that systems that use things like ADO over SOAP are not interoperable right now, thus should not be used.

I had a pleasure to discussed .NET Remoting with Ingo in this context. People who think about building distributed applications should really think if they really SOAP (and consider Remoting instead). And inversely, if you need interop ? don?t use Remoting?s SOAP channel. It really gives people false impression they are building Web Services while they are using slow protocol inside a system that isn?t built for interop.