WS-MAN (WinRM) is emphatically not RPC (DCE) based. It is SOAP based. There is no IDL, no huge range of TCP ports to firewall, no 32-bit/64-bit argument translation, just XML. There is no ‘remote procedure call’ per se, but rather alerts (like SNMP traps) and info requests (like SNMP queries). WinRM is based on WMI, which is more closely related to SNMP (with its MIBs) than any RPC implementation like OSF DCE or Sun XDR/RPC.
WCF is just a .NET API for communication. It is orthognal to RPC and WS-MAN (it can access both).
They can call it whatever they want. Whether I’m consuming a WCF service from a Delphi SOAP client/WSDL, or via a proxy using a net.tcp binding, the functional end result is the same:
An interface to an remote object.
Quack, Waddle, RPduCk.
>>WCF is just a .NET API for communication.
No. It’s a robust framework for persisting a remote interface to, and serializing data between, remote objects via a variety of bindings.
IOW, whatever the M$hills are calling it — it’s just DCOM/OLE/DDE/RPC for the Internet.