Book Review: Learning WCF

Learning WCF

Author: Michele Leroux Bustamante
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN-10: 0596101627
ISBN-13: 978-0596101626
Retail Price: $44.99 US, $58.99 CDN
Publication Date: May 2007
Softcover: 582 pages
Online information: Table of contents, source code
URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101626/
Book URL: http://www.thatindigogirl.com/

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems. It unifies various technologies previously available like Web Services and .NET Remoting into a single programming model and let you build Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications.

“Learning WCF” is a book targeted at experienced .NET developers wanting to learn WCF from scratch. In the first chapters, the author explains what services are and the whole idea behind SOA. She then guides you thru the WCF path learning about contracts, bindings, hosting, concurrency, reliability and security. You’ll find plenty of code examples and each one is explained in details. To help you apply the WCF concepts, each chapter has a lab that you can just read or experiment with by downloading the source code. The approach in these labs is a “step by step” one and often, the author guides you thru one path then backtracks and explains you a different way to accomplish the same thing. This is very useful to get a good understanding of the technology.

Even thought the title has the word “learning” in it, the book will get plenty of mileage serving as a reference book in the future and don’t think that it’s a “light” book; most of the concepts explained are advanced ones. I often had to reread complete sections not because they were poorly written but because of the vast amount of information provided.

WCF is vast and learning it is not a simple task but thanks to Michele Leroux Bustamante’s “Learning WCF”, this process is a lot simpler. High praises for “Learning WCF”.