Mohamed Elkammar said
This book achieved its goal precisely by providing a comprehensive coverage for the WCF architecture and how to make use of it.
I read some comments complaining about not providing examples and no actual working application is provided to demonstrate functionality. As the author declared at the beginning of his book: "I assume you, the reader, are an experienced developer[...] You should ideally have a fare understanding of .NET" so don't expect this book to teach you .NET. And if you are a developer that fits the description then you wouldn't have much trouble getting along with this book.
Richard Trinh said
Programming WCF Services by Juval Lowy is a good book for people who would like to migrate from conventional web service / windows service to the new paradigm. It is also good handbook for programmers who are well versed with the technology. The book covers everything from Design, Development to maintaining. The book is structured well. It starts with explanation on configuration and explains how to handle configuration programmatically. Even though I find it too detailed at some point, the good thing about the author/book is in a nutshell flow diagrams and tables have been effectively used.
Starting from the basics of Address, Contract, Bindings and End Points the book has everything in it for a SOA based implementations. Have details about various hosting methods, in depth details on Service and Data contracts. Instance Management is another good example of meaningful explanation. I liked the topic throttling under Instance management pretty much. The next chapter is my all time favorite. Then the author goes on to explain exception handling and transaction management for various kinds of calls, very important aspect of programming. A separate chapter for concurrency management is the need of the time, in this chapter handling threads and managing asynchronous calls in particular is real good one.
All the most important in a heterogeneous based SOA architecture are queuing and security. Talking about a send and forget (one-way calls), it becomes important to best understand where to use; Queued service is the chapter which is for it. Whether intranet / internet based, any service is open for malicious attacks and the author has explained various scenarios of attack and goes on to explain the various suggested security implementation, to make the book complete. Last but not the least the very good thing about this book is it explains beyond what to do? How to do? It details about where to do? And what not to do? In chapter 5 Configuring One-Way operations is one good example for it. This book has taught me the integrities of WCF and would remain my handbook whenever I write a WCF service.
Wiktor Szoltysek said
It's rare that you find technical books this well written. It helps that the author of the book directly worked on the design of WCF in the first place, no stone/detail is left unturned. All the important issues are covered: transactions, security, sessions etc. Very clear writing, great use of graphs for explaining complicated issues.
Makes for a great study guide for the 70-503 exam, and also as a WCF reference book.
Jon Dokulil said
This is a fantastic overview of WCF with just enough details to really understand all of the covered topics. This is probably above an 'intro' book. I've been programming with WCF for two years now, so I've got a good understanding of the technology. This book definitely took my understanding to the next level. He provides really useful code samples, plus explains the 'why' of the technology in terms of why things are broken up the way they are. This is also the first WCF book I've encountered that provides a thorough overview of the MSMQ bindings and transactions.
Naveen Razdhan said
I have read WCF concepts from other books and from MSDN before, but they all seemed more like documentation rather than well knit set of concepts. This book nicely dwells into the philosophy of Service Oriented Applications, from the standpoint of WCF.
I started reading the book by first reading the Appendix about "Introduction to Service Orientation". The Appendix really built foundation for everything that was to come by starting with assembly programming and leading up to component oriented programming using COM, and laying the foundation for the need for SOA. This was followed by explanation of how WCF is a great platform for building SOA.
Book starts with good introduction to the basic concepts like Service Execution Boundaries, Addresses, Contracts, Hosting, Bindings, Endpoints and WCF Architecture. The following chapters cover Contracts and Instance Management in a great detail.
The chapters I think really made fall in love with this book are chapter 7 and chapter 8, Transactions and Concurrency management. I was never really able to get well beyond basic understanding of WCF and grasp these complex concepts from other sources the way this book helped me grasp them. The book starts with some simple scenarios of Transactions and Concurrency and leads up to some very complicated scenarios and it's not hard to follow, although sometimes you may have read concepts more than once.
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