Learning WCF: A Hands-on Guide 1st Edition

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 book had the best labs of any technical book I have read/used. Usually labs, especially the MS Series, are extremely simple and don't even scratch the surface of the topics. The labs in this book are multi-step, with explanations of each step and what the code does. Then the author explains even further what the labs do. I think I got a pretty good hands-on experience with this book.This book could use some improvement in writing style, or just plain writing composition. When the author was discussing the labs the writing was usually pretty good and clear on point. However, when not talking about the labs, the writing was very hard to follow. The difficulty was not due to technical content, but much more to do with poor sentence and paragraph composition. At times, it reminded me of students' writing term papers for their professor. The writing seemed more focused on expressing what the person knew, rather than presenting the information in a way that could be learned. I got the first edition of this book, perhaps th second or subsequent editions have rewritten parts that were poorly written.In summary, even with the negative of the confusing writing style in some areas, this book is well worth getting for the superb labs and explanation of the labs.

First of all, the book is an excellent source for learning WCF, just like the book's title. I recently started a project that has to use WCF with VS 2008. There are a few WCF books out there, but they all are for VS 2005. This book has no exception. WCF in VS 2005 and VS 2008 are quite different. Michele updated all the labs source code to VS2008. When I ran into some problems, I sent some messages to Michele for helps. She replayed back very quickly and helped me to solve my problems. In the past, I have tried to send e-mail to authors of some books; most of them have never returned anything back to me. Michele is awesome and cares about the readers. Highly recommend for those who are learning WCF.

The fact that this book is on many developer's desks explains why some of the WCF applications out in the field simply make no sense."Learning WCF" fails to answer the most basic and important questions "What is WCF all about?" and "Why and when would one want WCF?".Instead, the book delves into the intimate details of the buttons, knobs, and switches of WCF. If you read through this enough times, you'll probably remember the various switches, etc. by rote, but you still won't have a clue about when and where WCF makes sense. The book is simply a loose conglomeration of WCF factoids.To be honest, I went through the book several times because it is readable and well-writen. I kept looking for what I may have missed in earlier attempts to Learn WCF from Bustamante's book. What I did find instead is that the essence of WCF is nowhere to be found in this book; this is most unfortunate.Instead of "Learning WCF", I would recommend Justin Smith's: Inside Windows Communication Foundation.As a final note, the book's attraction is the ample supply and well thought out hands-on exercises. That's where my second star comes from.