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How to make the framework and the dependent applications loosely coupled?

I have a specific case and I want to know the best practice way to handle it.
I make a specific .NET framework (web application). This web application acts like a platform or framework to many other web applications through the following methodology :
We create our dependent web applications (classes for the project business, rdlc reports) in a separate solutions then build them.
After that we add references to the resulted dll in the framework.
And create set of user controls (one for each dependent web application) and put them in a folder in the framework it self.
It works fine but any modification to a specific user control or any modification to any one of the dependent web applications. We have to add the references again and publish the whole framework !!
What I want to do is make those different web applications and the framework loosely coupled. So I could publish the framework one and only one and any modifications to the user controls or the different web applications just publish the updated part rather than the whole framework .
How to refactor my code so I can do this?
The most important thing is :
Never publish the whole framework if the change in any dependent application, just publish the updated part belongs to this application .

If loose coupling is what you are after, develop your "framework(web application)" to function as a WCF web service. Your client applications will pass requests to your web services and receive standard responses in the form of predefined objects.
If you take this route, I recommend that you implement an additional step: Do not use the objects passed to your client applications directly in your client code. Instead, create versions of these web service objects local to each client application and upon receiving your web service response objects, map them to their local counterparts. I tend to implement this with a facade project in my client solution. The facade handles all calls to my various web services, and does the mapping between client and service objects automatically with each call. It is very convenient.
The reason for this is that the day that you decide to modify the objects that your web service serves, you only have to change the mapping algorithms in your client applications... the internal code of each client solution remains unchanged. Do not underestimate how much work this can save you!
Developing WCF web services is quite a large subject. If you are interested, a book that I recommend is Programming WCF Services. It offers a pretty good introduction to WCF development for those who come from a .NET background.

I totally agree with levib, but I also have some tips:
As an alternative to WCF (with its crazy configuration needs), I would recommend ServiceStack. Like WCF it lets you receive requests and return responses in the form of predefined objects, but with NO code generation and minimal configuration. It supports all kinds of response formats, such as JSON, XML, JSV and CSV. This makes it much easier to consume from f.ex. JavaScript and even mobile apps. It even has binaries for MonoTouch and Mono for Android! It is also highly testable and blazing fast!
A great tool for the mapping part of your code is AutoMapper, it lets you set up all your mappings in a single place and map from one object type to another by calling a simple method.
Check them out! :)

Decades of experience says: avoid the framework and you won't have a problem to solve.
Frameworks evolve like cancer. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and a good portion of those good intentions are embodied in a colossal tumour of a framework all in the name of potential re-use that never really happens.
Get some experience and knowledge when it comes to OO and design, and you'll find endless solutions to your technical problem, such as facades, and mementos, and what have you, but they are not solutions to your real problem.
Another thing, if you are using MS technology, don't bother with anything beyond what .NET offers. Stick with what the MS gods offer because as soon as you digress and become committed to some inhouse framework, your days are numbered.

What are the benefits of migrating our application over to WCF as opposed to continuing to use .NET Remoting?

Alright, so I've asked several questions on StackOverflow about .NET Remoting, and there is always at least one person who just has to chime in, ".NET Remoting is deprecated, use WCF instead." I understand that it's deprecated and there is no guarantee of future support with new versions of the .NET Framework. But what are some other good reasons we would want to move over to WCF? I have seen a few mostly minor annoyances with .NET Remoting, however, this is not enough to change the minds the powers that be who believe firmly in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". At this time, the only reason that attitude will change is if .NET Remoting is removed from a future version of the .NET Framework, so who knows how long that will be?
Does anybody have any insight as why exactly WCF is "better" than .NET Remoting, or why Remoting is inferior to WCF? What are the pros and cons of each technology? Are there additional things you can do with WCF and not with Remoting?
I mean, it would be great if I could convince them to let us migrate our software over to WCF just to allow a configurable TcpChannel timeout to be set on the client side (this seems to have been broken for a while, no matter what steps or troubleshooting I try), and when this happens, it makes our software look like absolute shite.
Thanks in advance for helping to shed some light on this.

There are plenty of reasons to ditch remoting; a few might include:
lack of transport flexibility
versioning requirements are huge pain
platform dependent (no sensible chance of cross-platform usage)
no chance of usage from the growing mobile market
lack of future development: whatever feature you want added - it won't be
however, I would disagree that WCF is the automatic replacement; WCF itself is a pretty versatile tool, but can be pretty complex, and has restrictions of its own. I haven't used it myself, but I have seen lots of praise for Service Stack, essentially with users describing it as "WCF done right", i.e. the good bits of WCF, without the pain points. However, there are plenty of other options too. One nice thing about the idea of Service Stack, though, is that it iterates pretty quickly, and if it lacks something you want you can change it.

.NET Remoting is now a legacy technology, quoted from MSDN:
This topic is specific to a legacy technology that is retained for backward compatibility with existing applications and is not recommended for new development. Distributed applications should now be developed using the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
And here is a performance comparison between WCF and .NET Remoting done in 2007: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310550.aspx
To summarize the results, WCF is 25%—50% faster than ASP.NET Web
Services, and approximately 25% faster than .NET Remoting.
So I guess speed is a good reason to drop .NET Remoting.

While the given reasons are probably the driving considerations there are other non-trivial reasons:
Transport independence
IDE tooling
Ease of testing
Maintainability
When you use WCF you can change transport merely by editing your config file. This can be very handy when some sanctimonious system admin won't open a port and you need to use HTTP on port 80 to get through the corporate firewall.
The WCF tooling in Visual Studio is phenomenal. The hardest part is figuring out the URL you need. After that it's just point and click for code generation. There are one or two gotchas with serialisation of collections but broadly speaking if you tell both ends to use arrays it will just plain work. If you need a collection at the destination you can always construct one around the received array, and since LINQ will happily operate on arrays you can fold this into other transformations.
I'm not sure what Stephan P means by pain points. Editing the config can be tricky but Microsoft provides an excellent GUI tool that takes all the guesswork out of it by providing a full tree of options yet generating a sparse config file.
WCF services are easy to test because they have a published interface to which you can connect a test harness. This is more a virtue of SoA in general rather than WCF in particular, but it's still desirable.
WCF makes things a great deal simpler in my code, since neither application nor service is polluted with "routing" code (to determine what ought to process the message content); it looks like simple method calls or implementations. I mostly use WCF as a wrapper for MSMQ, and the only visible consequence of the transport selection is that these method calls must all be void functions because it's a OneWay transport. But that's hardly surprising when the point was persistent queueing.
This all speaks to maintainability. Even for in-house applications, maintenance is a dominant cost, and when you're supporting your software at customer sites poor maintainability can be crippling.
Then there's interoperability with otherwise incompatible platforms. In this case I'm thinking of using HTTP/XML or HTTP/JSON to provide service to web apps written in (eg) PHP.
Going the other way isn't quite so easy but it's fairly straightforward.

I give points for WCF with respect to logging and security.
Logging
WCF has an integrated Logging mechanism that helps you log traces that become a boon during maintanence. In other technologies, developer has to do some work to achieve this but in WCF, all that we have to do is to enable trace by changing the config file and WCF starts providing traces for you.
Security
Security mechanism in WCF is fairly simple and out of box when you look from the implementors perspective but is very robust and highly secure. The best part is that for the highy used and recommended bindings, WCF provides default security which can be trusted to the core. The message security on WSHTTPbinding is an example on these lines.
.NET Framework remoting does not do authentication or encryption by default. Therefore, it is recommended that you take all necessary steps to make certain of the identity of clients or servers before interacting with them remotely
Moreover WCF is an framework to develop Service Oriented applications under microsoft platform mixing both message and rpc style of programming. Which was not in the remoting. Remoting is basically oriented to rpc only.

Non-enterprise uses for WCF?

I'm interested in gaining a better understanding of WCF.
Of course, I can read books and tutorials about it, but it seems that a better way would be to actually come up with some project idea (either open-source or a startup) which would actually benefit from using WCF, and then build it using WCF.
What are your ideas for small-scale projects which might benefit from WCF?

I'm not sure it is really a matter of scale that drives a decision to use WCF. If a learning project is all you are interested in, then take a normal idea for a project, and turn the entire data access layer into WCF calls.
This should give you a fair understanding of all the little nooks and crannies of WCF, and allow you to fail in a controlled manner. That way you can make decisions in the future about when are where it is best to apply a service boundary using WCF.
As was already mentioned, anything to do with the web can benefit tremendously from WCF. Heck, you could build a pure JavaScript and HTML 5 application using WCF without ever touching ASP.Net.

A hosted service that a mobile device (such as a WP7 or iPhone) could connect with to retrieve data

WCF is great for setting up non-ASPX endpoints for Ajax clients. See for example this article. There are many more out there.

Any project involving .NET and communication is likely to benefit from WCF. WCF is the replacement for ASMX web services and for .NET Remoting. There's no one particular type of application that it is suited for. For instance, it's not like it's suitable for Enterprise applications but not for small ones.

WCF data contracts are very easy and handy for storing application configuration, settings and state. Write a library/application to take care of serialisation and editing.

I can't create a clear picture, why and when to use RESTful services? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Why do we need RESTful Web Services?
(8 answers)
Closed 9 years ago.
Why and when to use RESTful services?
I know how to create a WCF webservice. But I am not able to comprehend when to use a SOAP based service and when to use a RESTful service. I read many articles on SOAP vs REST, but still, I don't have a clear picture of why and when to use RESTful services.
What are some concrete points in order to easily decide between these services?

This is a worthy question, and one for which a short answer does no justice. Forgetting about the fact that most people may be more familiar with SOAP than REST, I think there are a few key points in this:
First and foremost, I would suggest using REST wherever it fits naturally. If your main use scenarios involve reading and updating data atoms ("resources"), REST provides a more lightweight, discoverable and straightforward approach to data access. Also, building really thin clients (mobile devices, JavaScript, even shell scripts) is often easier with REST.
For example: If your data model is all about customers and your main operations involve reading the customers and writing back changes, REST will do just fine. Using GET/POST/PUT/DELETE HTTP protocols is an excellent way to make the protocol very discoverable and easy to use, even for somebody not intimately familiar with your application.
This, however, brings us to the second point.
What if you need to offer a web API with querying capabilities? For example, a typical scenario might be "Get me the 5 newest customers". In this scenario, pure REST provides little in terms of API discoverability. Enter OData (www.odata.org), and you're rolling again; from this viewpoint, OData URI based query syntax adds a touch of well-known abstraction above the normal extremely simplistic, ID-based addressing of REST services.
But then, there are aspects which can be reasonably hard to represent in terms of REST. Point three: If you can't model it reasonably cleanly, consider SOA.
For example, if a common usage scenario involves transitioning customers between workflow stages (say, "new customer", "credit request received", "credit approved"), modeling such stages with REST may prove complex. Should different stages be represented just as an attribute value in an entity? Or perhaps, should the different stages be modeled as containers wherein the customers lie? If it's an attribute, do you always want to do a full PUT when updating it? Should you perhaps use a custom HTTP verb ("APPROVE http://mysite/customers/contoso HTTP/1.0")?
These are valid questions to which there are no universal answers. Everything can be modeled in REST, but at some point the abstraction breaks down so much that much of REST's human-facing benefits (discoverability, ease of understanding) are lost. Of course, technical benefits (like all the HTTP-level goodness) can still be reaped, but in most realities they're not really the critical argument anyway.
Fourth and finally, there are things which the SOA model simply does great. Perhaps the most important of these is transactions. While it's a pretty complex generic problem in the WS-* world as well, generic transactions are rarely needed and can often be replaced with reasonably simple, atomic operations.
For example, consider a scenario where you want to create an operation that allows the merging of two customers and all their purchases under one account. Of course, all this needs to happen or not happen; a typical transaction scenario. Modeling this in REST requires a nontrivial amount of effort. For a specialized scenario such as this, the easy SOA approach would be to create one operation (MergeCustomers) which implements the transaction internally.
For more advanced scenarios, the WS-* stack provides facilities not readily available in the REST world (including WS-Transaction, WS-Security and whatnot). While most APIs need none of this (or are better off implementing them in a more simple way), I don't think it's worth the effort to rewrite all that just to be 100% REST.
Look into the best of both worlds. For the vast majority of scenarios, it is completely acceptable to have the basic CRUD in REST and provide a few specialized operations in SOA.
Also, these APIs can be designed to act together. For example, what should a SOA-based MergeCustomers operation return? It might return a serialized copy of the merged customer, but in most cases I would opt for returning a URI of the REST resource that is the newly merged customer. This way, you would always have a single representation of the customer even if SOA were necessary for specialized scenarios.
The previous approach has the drawback that it requires client support for both REST and SOA. However, this is rarely a real problem (apart from the purely architectural perspective). The simplest clients usually have REST capabilities by the very definition of having an HTTP stack, and they rarely run the more complex operations.
Of course, your mileage may vary. The needs of your application (and its clients), local policies and backward compatibility requirements often seem to dominate these discusssions in forehand, so the REST vs. SOA discussion is rarely on a pure technical merit basis.

An eternal question! SOAP vs. REST....
SOAP is great because it's industrial-strength, the services are self-describing in a machine-readable and -interpretable way, e.g. your computer can read, understand a SOAP service and create a client for it. SOAP is great because it's methods and all the data it will ever pass around are described and defined in great detail. But SOAP is a bit heavy-weight - it takes a lot of infrastructure to support it. SOAP is also mostly method-oriented, e.g. you define your services by means of what methods can be executed on the service.
REST is much more light-weight - it uses only established HTTP protocol and procedures, so any device that has an HTTP stack (and what doesn't, these days) can access a REST service. No SOAP heavy-lifting needed. REST is also more resource-centric, e.g. you think about resources, collections of resources, and their properties and how to deal with those (so you're basically back to the core function of create, read, update, delete). REST doesn't currently have any machine-readable service description, so you're either left to try and see, or you need some documentation from the service provider, to know what resources you have at hand.
My personal bottom line: if you want to expose some collections of data, and reach (being able to access it from any device) and ease-of-use is more important than reliability and other enterprise-grade features, then REST is the way to go. If you need serious, business-to-business, well-defined, well-documented services that implement things like reliability, transaction support etc. - then you're definitely on the right track with SOAP.
But I really don't see a REST exclusive or SOAP kind of approach - they'll be great scenarios for both.

SOAP will give you a richer set of functionality and you can create strongly typed services, where REST is normally more lightweight and easier to get running.
Edit: If you look at the ws-* standards there is a lot of stuff http://www.soaspecs.com/ws.php. Development tools such as Visual Studio make access very easy to a lot of this though. Typically WS is used more for enterprise SOA type development while REST is used for public API's on web sites (at least thats what I think).

Android (mobile OS) do not have support for SOAP. RESTful services are a much better suit when mobile devices are the target.
I personally prefer RESTful services in most cases since they are more lightweight, easier to debug and integrate against (unless you use a code generator for SOAP).

One point that hasn't been mentioned is overhead. A recent REST project I worked on involved file transfer with items up to 2 GB allowed. If it had been implemented as a SOAP service, that'd be an automatic 30%+ increase in data due to encoding. The overhead with a REST service is all headers, the rest is straight data.

How to promote WCF to a non-techie?

How would you describe and promote WCF as a technology to a non-technical client/manager/CEO/etc?
What are competing solutions or ideas that they might bring up(such as those they read about in their magazines touting new technology)?
What is WCF not good for that you've seen people try to shoehorn it into?
-Adam

Comparing with .asmx: WCF is the next generation of Microsoft's Web service development platform, which addresses many of the issues with older versions, specifically:
better interoperation, so you can interoperate with Web services that aren't from Microsoft or that are published on the Internet
much more flexible, so it's easier and faster for developers to get their jobs done
easier to configure without changing code, reducing the cost of maintenance significantly
It may be that they raise the question of how it relates to SOA, a "service-oriented architecture". WCF is the Microsoft solution for creating applications that participate in these distributed systems.

Tell them it'll let you do your job easier which translates into less time and less money.

In a single sentence, I'd say that WCF is "software that lets you set up and manage communication between systems a lot more efficiently than in the past".
I can see them bringing up BizTalk as a competitor, but of course you could say that WCF works with it and is in fact used as base technology for it in the more recent versions.
I'm not sure if I can think of any inappropriate shoe-horning of WCF that I have seen, although there are plenty of legacy apps that will probably be "upgraded" to WCF that don't really need to be for any real business reason.

There is an inter-op angle as well. If you upgrade your Asmx services to WCF services you can still honor your asmx clients and then start moving forward with newer WCF clients. WCF is starting to get some ReST attention, RSS is there, Silverlight has a place with WCF. Performance is better, depending on the bindings you choose. One of the big draw backs is a steeper learning curve comapred to Asmx services, the great power/great responsibilty problem and then the 101 ways to do the same thing.
None of this is CxO talk but refactor the language into magazine buzz words so that they can see the future of this technology.