MIZD said
Even the back page of the book mentions "If you choose to learn WCF, you have choosen well...", this is not for learning WCF.
I thought I could learn WCF with this book because of its table of content, but you can't.
This is more or less a reference book. If you already know how to implement WCF and need to know some details regarding some certain
implementation, than it seems to be fine.
Because they mention on the back page one can learn WCF with it, I am disappointed about this book.
Helen said
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.
Jeffrey Schenk said
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.
Larry Marvin Wall said
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.
Vu Tran said
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"
Comments