WCF communication from c++ gSOAP or C++/CLI?

Question

I have several unmanaged c++ programs that I use to do "heavy lifting" type operations. I like to database certain information that these clients use. In order to do this I created a WCF service which exposes my DAL to the database. I then created a managed C++/CLI wrapper to call the web service from the native C++. Would it be better to parse the WSDL using gSOAP and connect to the WCF service using SOAP?

Answer 1

The C++/CLI wrapper approach does have many advantages. This does make a simple way to use all of the WCF tooling, with any transport mechanism, from within C++. However, it does introduce a dependency on the CLR, which may or may not be acceptable.

Another option would be to use the C++ REST API (aka Casablanca) to call the WCF service directly, using a pure native API. This would require exposing the WCF service via REST.