Yes indeed! I remember reading Michael Abrash's book "Zen of Assembly Language" way back in the DOS days. It was like a "Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance" kind of book for understanding not just assembly language but also algorithms in general. I walked away from that book feeling like I understood more about my craft. The same can be said of the famous Petzold "Programming Windows" books. I _knew_ how Windows programs worked internally, and knowledge of message pumps, device contexts, and the GDI still comes in handy today. More recently, I've been a fan of the APress Programming .NET books since they give a lot of detail that's not easy to find elsewhere. I've noticed two trends recently though that disturb me. It makes me sound "old", but I really do think it's a generational thing. First, young programmers in our company turn to video instruction first, forums second, and books almost not at all. It's fine for a superficial understanding that allows you to get work done, but until you really grok the async framework (speaking .NET here), lambdas, and so on it's difficult to work with existing code so lots of stuff gets duplicated. Second, it seems like our profession is more willing to put up with copy-and-paste code from Stack Overflow answers than it has ever been. Tons of people who couldn't code themselves out of a box are writing software for large corporations by pasting in the work of others and messing with it until it has the appearance of working. This "good enough coding" style is what makes business folk think we're all easily replaceable and that coding is super simple. At the end of the day, I blame big business for killing off the book. Doing things right and avoiding obvious security flaws just isn't important to stakeholders anymore. That's why we're _still_ seeing SQL injection attacks in 2016... Technical instruction is now aimed at the copy-and-paste people. The market will follow the consumers, and us book-reading folk no longer represent the majority.

Personally I prefer message queues these days. Several people have mentioned SignalR, and the hub could be considered a broker of sorts I guess. I've recently used both RabbitMQ (via the EasyNetQ library) and NetMQ to build microservices. For [potentially] load balanced services over a network, I prefer Rabbit. For single-process service containers (sounds strange at first, but we use in-process microservices at work to make individual components completely self-contained, allowing parallel development by many teams) I like using NetMQ with inproc sockets. NetMQ is also capable of TCP connections but IMHO the monitoring tools are not as good as the ones available for Rabbit. So, to answer the original question - is WCF dead? I don't think so. I think it's similar to WPF; not dead, but nobody is really working on new features or improvements either.

Oops - this was supposed to be a reply to kmoores. If you read his comment, mine will suddenly make sense. lol Yes! I have the same problem. I install Visual Studio 2015, and then started typing "visu..." in the Start Menu. I figured it was one of the few programs I have (the only program?) that starts with that sequence of letters, so "finding" it in the menu should be simple. Boy was I wrong. Instead, it gives me *web* results by default. When I click to instead go into "My Stuff", the first result is an app in the Windows App Store that I don't have installed; I think it's "Daylight HD Free". I don't understand how searching a few dozen links and their associated text can possibly be so incredibly broken. It's really aggravating when I have to interact with it like this, so I've noticed that I am pinning everything to the taskbar and basically ignoring the start menu. Oh, Microsoft. The more you change the more you stay the same.