Learning WCF: A Hands-On Guide

I purchased this and Lowy's book on WCF. Of the two, I'd say this is the one that will make WCF real to blue collar developers. More technical books need to be written this way. The author does an outstanding job of describing the pieces and parts of WCF from a functional standpoint before leading the reader through simple step-by-step exercises. These do a solid job of reinforcing the theory. I normally blow off working through sample code in technical works, but with WCF, it really helps to explore some of the nuances to things like serialization, callbacks and security. These are best appreciated by doing hands-on walkthroughs and fortunately, the author has provided very good examples in the companion download. Lowy's book is good for different reasons, but I feel far more conversant in the WCF area having read and re-read Bustamente's book. Lowy's is a nice companion and it goes deep into stuff that, unless your current project really needs it, you'll brain dump in two weeks. Quote Lowy at swank cocktail parties with the hoi poloi, but use this book when you want to gain a solid understanding of this thing we call WCF. Bustamente writes clearly and to the point. Git r' done types like me who are interested in exploring the functional without getting lost in the minutiae will appreciate Learning WCF. This book is not about SOA although the author does touch on some basic premises governing what it does for the enterprise. Unlike Lowy, there weren't any real groaners about how SOA is going to replace OO and end world poverty. OO maybe got 30% penetration among software developers in formal polls. (As an informal measure, go into any MS shop and check out how many OO diagrams are created by devs in their work and you'll see what I mean. Most MS shops won't even spend money on third party modeling tools.) SOA isn't going to do any better and it addresses a different set of problems than does OO. Bustamente gives developers a solid grounding in appreciating what WCF can do while leaving all the fluff about "paradigm shifts" and what-not for others.

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.

This is an absolutely awesome book for those new to WCF, experienced in WCF development and looking at tuning their skills, or trainers looking for quality material for their students (I used this book to prep for the Instructor Led Lab session I delivered at Tech.Ed Australia 2007 and I know the two attendees I gave copies too were also extremely impressed with its content). Every topic discussed in this book is reinforced with hands-on-labs and code examples in both VB.NET and C# and Michele has also delivered a 15 part series titled "Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom" based on the book (see my blog at [...] for a detailed review of each presentation). If you're serious about WCF, this is the book to get.

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.

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.