Learning WCF: A Hands-on Guide
This easy-to-use introduction to Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is ideal for developers who want to learn to build services on a company network or as part of an enterprise system.
Built into Windows Vista and Longhorn, and available for Windows XP and Windows 2003, WCF provides a platform for service-oriented architecture (SOA) that enables secure and reliable communication among systems within an organization or across the Internet.
With WCF, software developers can focus on their business applications and not the plumbing required to connect them. Furthermore, with WCF developers can learn a single programming API to achieve results previously provided by ASMX, Enterprise Services and .NET Remoting. Learning WCF removes the complexity of using this platform by providing detailed answers, explanations and code samples for the most common questions asked by software developers.
Windows Communication Foundation (or WCF, formerly code name "Indigo") provides a set of programming APIs that make it easy to build and consume secure, reliable, and transacted services. This platform removes the need for developers to learn different technologies such as ASMX, Enterprise Services and .NET Remoting, to distribute system functionality on a corporate network or over the Internet.
The first truly service-oriented platform, WCF provides innovations that decouple service design and development from deployment and distribution - creating a more flexible and agile environment. WCF also encapsulates all of the latest web service standards for addressing, security, reliability and more.
Table of Contents Summary
Top 3 - Most helpful customer reviews
This should be the first WCF book you get
You may want to acquire various other WCF books for depth, but if you're just getting started with WCF, this is the book you want. There isn't another book out there that compares to it. It's cleanly written and nicely balances conceptual material on service orientation with the practicalities of Windows Communication Foundation.
Many other books on WCF take the form of a "brain dump" on WCF features, or get bogged down in conceptual discussion of Service Oriented Architecture. Instead, Ms. Bustamante has a very clear, logical path from simple WCF features to more complex. You won't be overwhelmed early, but you will eventually get to most of the advanced features you'll likely need. Other books, such as Juval Lowy's Programming WCF Services (Programming), can pick up at that point for the really advanced topics.
Many of the chapters contain step-by-step labs, and you can get working end results from the author's web site. They start easy and build nicely through more complex concepts.
The sample code in the book is in C#, but if you happen to be a Visual Basic developer (as I am), you're not left out. Many of the labs and samples are also available in VB on the author's web site.
The book was unfortunately published too early to include definite coverage of the Visual Studio 2008 features for automatically generating some of the code you need to use WCF. Those capabilities are in the Visual Studio 2008 beta now and will be released in the next few months. Some of the labs could have been simplified by using those Visual Studio features. But, on the positive side, working through the labs in more detail will give you a more in-depth understanding of the subject and enable you to use the Visual Studio features more effectively.
Billy Hollis14 November, 2007
A 'must buy' for WCF
I have trawled round quite few books, articles, samples etc which all promised instant knowledge of WCF. Fortunately I came across Michele's book before I gave up in despair. I found the style just refreshing; it talked you through the concepts in bite-sized chunks and never tried to swamp you in technology.
Not just that, but Hands-On-Labs as well; yes, labs that work out of the box and demonstrate the principal at issue. Not just labs but solutions too that actually work. It does exactly what it says on the tin.
I've found this "tell it how it is and provide working samples" to be a real novelty in the WCF space.
If you want to get WCF-competent, then get this book. If you want to trash around in the dark for a few more weeks, then there's plenty of others I could suggest.
P. D. Besly18 June, 2007
Master WCF with this book
A very thorough treatment of WCF backed by hands-on labs. The labs are simple yet drive the concepts home. And once you've done a lab you can easily apply the lesson in your professional project.
Chapters 1 -5 and 8 are the most useful to my situation, although I would have liked chapter 8 (on Exceptions and Faults) to be a tad deeper on fault handling, especially regarding the catching of FaultException at the client side.
That said, off the bat I was professionally operational as soon as I had digested chapter 1. Chapter 2 explained Contracts, the agreement between services and clients. That chapter clarifies how server and client sides cooperate. Chapter 3 explains Bindings and allows you to make wise choices regarding which channel etc... will best serve your need. Chapter 4 explains Hosting. It was good to get simple but very helpful tips like the recommendation to have a console host in the project even though the main production hosting will be say, IIS or a Windows Service host. The console host is so invaluable during debugging sessions where I do not have to constantly stop and start a Windows service host. Chapter 5 adds more to hosting by explaining instancing and when the need for concurrency arises.
K. LEW12 July, 2007