I received this book from the publisher a while ago and I've finally made it through and found some time to write up a review. Generally I really like doing book reviews, but I also like to thoroughly read the book before I dive into writing about it - which leads to a long delay between reviews. That aside, here's a review of "Windows Communication Foundation 3.5 Unleashed" by Craig McMurtry, Marc Mercuri, Nigel Watling, and Matt Winkler.
Windows Communication Foundation 3.5 Unleashed, 2nd Edition
by Craig McMurtry, Nigel Watling, Matt Winkler, Marc Mercuri
Publisher: Sams Publishing
Pub. Date: October 2008
ISBN-13: 9780672330247
Pages: 768
List Price: $49.99
Right off the bat, I can give this book some credit. I knew absolutely nothing about WCF before I began reading. With the help of this book, I've got a much better understanding now, and I even used it to help publish a couple of tutorials.
That being said, I felt the organization of the content could have used a little work. It wasn't until chapter 3, "Data Representation and Durable Services", that things started to click for me. Chapter 2, "The Fundamentals", left me pretty confused. I think the approach of showing the XML configuration before showing how to build clients and servers in code was a mistake. There was an aura of black-magic until it explained what exactly was going on.
I thought devoting an entire chapter to the fundamentals of Windows Workflow Foundation was odd, but I did find the content really informative. Just like WCF, I didn't know anything about WF either.
The middle of the book, chapters 7-10, describe security. Security is typically something I leave on the back burner, but when dealing with networked applications it can sometimes be very important. Microsoft is pushing CardSpace pretty hard right now, and this book contains an entire chapter on securing applications with information cards.
The 3rd quarter of the book, which is the stuff I'm interested in, is the advanced stuff. Interoperability with legacy systems, custom transports, custom channels, and custom behaviors. What's great about WCF is that you don't have to conform to its way, you can make it work with any system or protocol you want. This was all great information, but this is where the book really failed as an advanced resource. The code snippets contained a lot of white space and the font was way too large. You typically had to span multiple pages just to follow a simple sample. The authors were also a little wordy at times. There was a lot of fluff to get through before getting to some meat.
The remainder of the book was about WCF application life cycles: manageability and versioning. Manageability wasn't something I was particularly interested in, however versioning is an important concept. Knowing the correct way modify endpoints and operations is something that pretty much all WCF application developers will need to know.
If you don't know what WCF and want to know, this is probably a good place to start.
If you're familiar with WCF, this book will definitely introduce you to some concepts that will make your life easier.
It has some great advanced information, but using it as a resource might be a little frustrating. Read it once and use something else to look stuff up.
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