Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation: Hands-on, Vista series

Product Description

Microsoft developers, get ready for Windows Vista programming! Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation: Hands-on addresses an unmet need in the marketplace as there are no books, or much documentation at all, of the post-Beta 1 WCF programming model. This book contains the information you will need to work with this technology upon its release.



You will gain a comprehensive understanding of how to apply the Windows Communication Foundation to almost any distributed computing problem, from enterprise scale to peer-to-peer. Most importantly, after reading the book and working through the examples, you will actually have considerable experience using WCF, because the book takes you through the steps of actually building Windows Communication Foundation solutions.



Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation: Hands-on is the only book to cover capabilities comprehensively, including the facilities for building Representational State Transfer and Plain XML software services, and the extensive management interfaces.

Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #432695 in Books
* Published on: 2006-05-25
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 560 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Craig McMurtry and Marc Mercuri are members of Microsoft’s Evangelism team tasked with telling the world about the technology. As such, the authors have exclusive access to the very designers and developers that are producing the technology, as well as to early releases thereof. That access provides insights into features and application of the technology that others do not have, as well as knowledge of how the technology will evolve, and familiarity with best practices that are only just being formulated by the testing teams.

Customer Reviews

Great book for learning WCF -- but examples are outdated4
This book was out well before the RTM of WCF and I'm amazed at how great a job the authors did being so far in the lead of the wave of WCF books. The entire book is really a set of explanatory articles walking readers through introductory topics, general knowledge, and deep dives into specific areas of WCF.

The writing style is clear and to the point, and the exercises are great for demonstrating the specific bits they're talking about. The authors managed to keep all the code examples up to date via constant update releases on a companion website.

There's also a bonus chapter covering InfoCard, its background, and how it ties in with WCF and some nice example code.

(This is also one of the very few useful books I've found from Sams. I generally dislike their offerings, but this one's a winner.)

a work still in progress, but quite intriguing5
WCF is a very promising new technology being put out by Microsoft. You should take note that it is still actively a work in progress. Made clear both by the text in the book and by postings from other reviewers and the authors. There is indeed a potential drawback, inasmuch as specific coding details may get obsoleted by an eventual stable production release. But before you are tempted to turn away, keep in mind that the very title cover of the book says "Beta Edition". The advantage is an early, informal look at WCF.

There are several intriguing parts of WCF. One that caught my attention is claims-based authorisation. It generalises the well established idea of an Access Control List. All previous implementations of ACLs were specific to given platforms. There was no concept that you would need to have some kind of ACL across multiple platforms. Whereas Microsoft has used the Security Assertion Markup Language to implement claims in a textual XML format that can be conveyed between platforms. Potentially, it means that claims can be instantiated under unix or linux, for example, and be fully compatible with those under a Microsoft operating system.

It's also nice as another demonstration how XML really is the way to go for interplatform interoperability. Unlike the binary morass of CORBA.

The book is replete with C# code examples. Plus the Sams website has more code. You can quickly start tinkering.

Good Initial Perspective on WCF5
Gives a good MSFT perspective on WCF and the HOWTO get up & running with WCF.