Written by Microsoft software legend Juval Lowy, Programming WCF Services is the authoritative introduction to Microsoft's new, and some say revolutionary, unified platform for developing service-oriented applications (SOA) on Windows. Relentlessly practical, the book delivers insight, not documentation, to teach developers what they need to know to build the next generation of SOAs.

After explaining the advantages of service-orientation for application design and teaching the basics of how to develop SOAs using WCF, the book shows how you can take advantage of built-in features such as service hosting, instance management, asynchronous calls, synchronization, reliability, transaction management, disconnected queued calls and security to build best in class applications. Programming WCF Services focuses on the rationale behind particular design decisions, often shedding light on poorly-documented and little-understood aspects of SOA development. Developers and architects will learn not only the "how" of WCF programming, but also relevant design guidelines, best practices, and pitfalls. Original techniques and utilities provided by the author throughout the book go well beyond anything that can be found in conventional sources.

Based on experience and insight gained while taking part in the strategic design of WCF and working with the team that implemented it, Programming WCF Services provides experienced working professionals with the definitive work on WCF. Not only will this book make you a WCF expert, it will make you a better software engineer. It's the Rosetta Stone of WCF.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 69 Ratings

Great Resource for Experienced Programmers New to SOA - 2009-10-17
Reviewer Rating:

I am a Microsoft Certified Trainer, a real fan of Microsoft WCF curriculum, MSDN articles and the like, but it was not until I read Juval's book that I began to fully comprehend the importance and benefit of WCF.

I was never a com, Corba, or .NET Remoting programmer--never really understood all the flail about SOA, so I found the Introduction to Service-Orientation appendix exceptionally well written--for the first time I am comfortable that I understand the why-behind-the-how of SOA; Juval's isn't the first write up on SOA I have ever seen, but it was the first couched in terms that made me understand.

I am whipping the point about comprehending SOA because if you don't get SOA, then you don't get WCF; if you feel like a deer in the headlights when someone asks you about it, this appendix will be worth the cost of the book.

Sometime's too many choices leads to confusion, and that's certainly how I find the security options available in WCF; if you're struggling with security choices, you will find Juval's approach in the security chapter a welcome salve to that problem, for example, he offers candid assessments of delegation and impersonation that I have seen nowhere else.

The book did a superb job by way of example in making me understand how to best exploit the base classes that come with System.ServiceModel.

The WCF Coding Standard offered should be given an award for all the fantastic guidance it offers to those of us who are babes in the WCF faith-I refer to it constantly, and have used it as a baseline for my own organization's standard.

I read some of the other reviews before making my purchase decision... I noticed a few that claimed this book was too deep for those not already bathed in distributed computing experience--I disagree. While I have been programming for many years (Assembler, C++, Java, C#, more...), I have almost no distributed computing experience, and thanks to the advice of Juval and Michelle Bustamante (another great O'Reilly WCF book), I have successfully implemented the beginnings of what looks to be a rock-and-roll load-balanced WCF/SOA architecture.

While I have learned a great deal from Microsoft courses and sources, a fair measure of the credit for my present successes in WCF goes to these O'Reilly books.

Great WCF book for all levels - 2009-09-29
Reviewer Rating:
I was trying to learn WCF for a few months. I was looking for a book that could provides me the detail of WCF framework from ground up, then I would move to WCF advance later - well might be from other book. I picked this book based on recommendation from my co-workers. I also owned "Pro WCF" from Apress publisher. This book has turned into great resource for me. It covered every detail of WCF from the basic concept of service contracts, hosting, addresses, and binding to higher level such as concurrency, or security. The author provided a lots of examples in depth explanations. It was great guide for WCF starter and good resource for advance programmer. It was much better than "Pro WCF"

Helen - 2010-02-04
Reviewer Rating:
I am angry and dissapointed after I purchased this book. You can find now "pure information" by going through MSDN and reading in Internet. What book can do for you is to add conceptual understanding of subject (WCF in this situation), concept of architecture and relation with other popular architecture, comparative review with other architectures that have similar goals (Remoting, Web Services, Windows Services), and you would expect step by step tutorial, related to common development environment VS 2008. Or the best would be all of the above.
This book provides none of above. It is rather boring list of attributes, classes, and termins of WCF with considerable lower level of explaining then in MSDN. I vision this book being written but cutting and pasting from MSDN and a little of renaming and highlighting.
Cheap, fast and makes fat book. I would buy the other book but all time I had before starting archtecture change for the project I wasted on waiting for this book.

Good WCF programming guide but light on IDE and/or compile information. - 2009-10-14
Reviewer Rating:
As a programming guide this covers both the APIs in C# and the XML config file elements that you'll need to know to do intermediate level WCF. It is very thorough and a suitable book for those who want to go beyond the tactical act of creating a simple web service and instead want to understand the full capabilities of the technology and how to apply it. However, as I believe some other reviewers have commented, it glosses over most of the "how to" aspects of WFC as it relates to the Visual Studio, the compiler(s), WAS, IIS etc.. As a result it can be a hurdle to get a first library built and deployed in a real host to test the concepts that are outlined in the book. Ultimately you end up going to other resources or just trying things out in Visual Studio. To be clear there is lots of high level practical guidance on things like the advantages and disadvantages of WAS vs. IIS hosting but little if any how to information. The author could have written one chapter on "how to" type information for Visual Studio, IIS, and WAS and increased the size of the book by say 30 pages (maybe 50 with screen shots) and done everyone a big service. Also on a technology level I think that for a book at this level I would have liked to have seen coverage of the WebHttpBinding binding given the proliferation of REST/POX/JSON based applications today.

Superb Information and Fun to Read - 2009-09-26
Reviewer Rating:
It gives comprehensive coverage of the WCF technology written with a touch that makes it a delightful book to read.

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