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 actu开发者_JAVA技巧ally 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?

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.