Qn: When is a protocol stack not a stack?

Ans: When it is a "framework".

Had a very good talk about Windows Communication Foundation.

This is the means by which software shall talk to software in the future. And jolly good it is too. For me the most impressive thing is the way that they have used the features of C# (interfaces, attributes etc) to make it easy to set up connections and select the components that you want to use in any given situation.

When I was a lad there was much talk of protocol stacks. I even wrote a song about the ISO/OSI seven layer stack for one of my world famous lectures in rhyme....

But these days things have moved on, and now the talk would seem to be of "frameworks". I think these are a bit like stacks, but laid on their sides and with the ability to have extra bits (like security and compression) plugged in alongside.

It does seem very easy to link two process on the same or different machines and it looks as if this technology will make a lot of hard wraught code redundant as it takes away a lot of the difficulty in linking programs together.