Programming WCF Services

By Juval Lowy

Programming WCF Services is the authoritative, bestselling introduction to Microsoft's unified platform for developing service-oriented applications (SOA) on Windows. Hailed as the most definitive treatment of WCF available, this relentlessly practical book provides insight, not documentation, to help you learn the topics and skills you need for building WCF-based applications that are maintainable, extensible, and reusable.

Author Juval Lowy, Microsoft software legend and participant in WCF's original strategic design review, revised this new edition for the latest productivity-enhancing features of C# 3.0 and the .NET 3.5 SP1 Framework. The book also contains Lowy's ServiceModelEx, a framework of useful utilities, tools, and helper classes that let you simplify and automate many tasks, and extend WCF as well. With this book, you will:

• Learn about WCF architecture and essential building blocks, including key concepts such as reliability and transport session
• Use built-in features such as service hosting, instance management, concurrency management, transactions, disconnected queued calls, and security
• Take advantage of relevant design options, tips, and best practices in Lowy's ServiceModelEx framework to increase your productivity and the quality of your WCF services
• Learn the rationale behind particular design decisions, and discover poorly documented and little-understood aspects of SOA development

By teaching you the "why" along with the "how" of WCF programming, Programming WCF Services not only will help you master WCF, it will enable you to become a better software engineer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 5, 2008
• ISBN: 9780596803056

Juval Lowy

Juval Lowy is a software architect and the principal of IDesign, specializing in .NET architecture consulting and advanced training. Juval is Microsoft’s Regional Director for the Silicon Valley, working with Microsoft on helping the industry adopt .NET 4.0. He participates in the Microsoft internal design reviews for future versions of .NET and related technologies. Juval has published numerous articles, regarding almost every aspect of .NET development, and is a frequent presenter at development conferences. Microsoft recognized Juval as a Software Legend, one of the world's top .NET experts and industry leaders.

Reviews for Programming WCF Services

[nmarun-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The book begins with the very basics (WCF Essentials) and soon takes a deep-dive into Service, Data and Operation contracts and other aspects of WCF, making it a useful for both novice and expert readers. The author gives a good number of intricate details about WCF.I usually either just glance through or skip the appendix of many books that I've read - this one was an exception, read through all the appendices (WCF Coding Standard being a top-notch appendix).This book will be one of those 'I will use this as a reference handbook' book.

[joewirtley_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not a good introductory book. This book has a lot of advanced material and is not an appropriate first book on WCF. It also suffers from some bad choices regarding what is inluded and formatting. As one example, every time an attribute is mentioned, the code for the attribute declaration is in the text. This gets in the way when you have to differentiate between the important code and the attribute declaration. It also needs better organization or formatting. The security chapter goes on for 104 pages and is divided into sections on different scenarios that are difficult to tell apart. However, I expect to be coming back to this book when I need to understand how things really work in WCF and when I'm looking for more advanced information. It's a good book to have in your WCF library, but probably not the first one.