Learning WCF - Michele LeRoux Bustamante

It’s not easy for a developer to keep up with the available frameworks in today’s flow of new technologies. There are the big players like Java and .NET for the enterprise applications but also more recent ones like RoR. Each technology has also its components for the presentation, the service and the data access layers. In the .NET world, we have seen two major releases in just one year with .NET 3.0 and the just released .NET 3.5 : WPF, WCF, WWF, Visual Studio 2008, ASP.NET Ajax, Silverlight, Linq, EntityManager etc …

The book by Michele LeRoux Bustamante  is an introduction, but a complete one. Its 607 pages cover are a well deserved coverage of all aspects of the WCF stack. Each chapter contains one or several labs to explore a feature. Following the labs, the main considerations are explained (configuration, drawbacks, security, developpement vs production time). The book covers the main features like security or exceptions but also some less well-known like the custom serialization mechanism.

Like other books about WS-* technologies, you have to understand the implementation but also the different specifications–and there are a lot in WS-*. But “Learning WCF” eases the process and is an essential tool for developers.