Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation Step by Step [With CDROM]

This is an outstanding book on WCF. It starts by providing an effective introduction to, and explanation of the need for WCF. It then does a nice job of truly taking the reader step-by-step through the various aspects of WCF, using solid examples and labs to assist in learning. I had taken a 5-day course on WCF ~18 months ago and summarily forgot most of what I learned since I didn't make use of it. While I expected this to refresh my memory, it went well beyond that. I did run into a couple of issues. I found that I needed to know a bit about SQL Server to provide appropriate login and read/write access for the NETWORK SERVICE user on Vista. In addition, I experienced a little challenge in getting an SSL certificate working for one of the labs. Even taking those issues into consideration, the book is well worth getting if you want to learn WCF -- and if you are moving towards SOA in the .NET world, you definitely want to learn and use WCF. One other caution. While the content is outstanding, my book had issues with some pages pulling away from the binding. This seems to be a manufacturing issue with the book that I received, so be aware of that when you use the book, in case the problem crosses over to other copies of the book.

I bought 2 other books on WCF and have scanned through a number of others and this one is, by far, the most useful and practical of the ones I have seen. I especially liked the chapter on making your WCF service robust, providing what I felt was very practical advice for a production level service. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is going to be building a production service and is just ramping up on WCF.

Normally I'm not thrilled with the "Step by Step" books from MS Press, this one is definately the exception. Though not every practice project worked "out of the box" the book details the "how to" create a WCF service in great detail with applicable examples in code. Very informative and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs to know how to get their WCF services up and running. Things I liked about the book were the straight forward examples and explanations of how to setup and run a WCF service using many different hosting methods (IIS, Windows Service, and a Windows Host Application). The clear and concise explanations made a tough job a heck of alot easier. Things I did not like about the book were the lack of explanation of "unexpected errors" you might encounter if you setup a test case incorrectly. The book could come a long way by including some of the common errors you're likely to encounter if you miss a step or your PC isn't setup properly for the example you're running. Still, lacking that, this is a great book for getting started with WCF, I highly recommend it.

I've read quite a few books in the Step by Step series and am often a little frustrated with them. By their very nature, they walk you through specific scenarios and explain them to you. They typically do this quite well. And while I typically get a lot out of this, I often am left wanting for more. This isn't a knock on the series, it's just an inherent limitation. After all, no author can foresee every scenario a reader might have. This book was a little different though. The first three chapters were pretty typical in that they were the basic use cases you'd expect. THen you hit Chapter 4 "Protecting an Enterprise Service" and things get interesting fast. From start to finish, just about every single security question I had was answered here. Chapter 5 builds on it and expands the scenarios to the internet and by the time you get through those two chapters, you'll 'get' security and WCF. The book then goes onto Service Contracts, State management, Transactions and Reliable sessions. I was a little underwhelmed with the discussion on Reliable Sessions but it was decent. Chapter 10 goes on to using configuration to manage services and man, this really helped me to make progress. It's so easy to screw up simple things in configuration and end up hitting a wall, but this got me through it. Chapter 11 goes on to discuss OneWay/Asyn operations (which is one of the more straightforward aspects of WCF). Nothing dramatic here but again, a pretty good discussion. Chatper 12 goes onto Performance. Superb! Too often when I was learning the WCF, I was satisfied to get things working and didn't worry nearly enough about performance. Eventually though, you're going to have to deal with Performance and this chapter gets you there. Another great touch was Chatper 15 - Managing Identity with Windows Cardspace. I'm not personally using Cardspace but this chapter was just plain cool and a great touch. All in all, this is the best book in the Step by Step series I've ever read. There's some stiff competition to be the 'best' of the WCF books out there, but this book is definitely going to be a contender.