Learning WCF

Preface

My entire career has been about learning and applying new technologies. It has also been about taking on new challenges related to technology and business. I enjoy learning new things, and I like to share things that I have learned through writing and public speaking. I like to help others learn challenging subjects, in particular related to building distributed enterprise systems—one of my favorite subjects. I was serious about writing another book for a few years leading up to this book, but I was waiting for something that I could get really passionate about: something that solved the kinds of problems that architects and developers face when they build enterprise systems; something that was worth giving up sunlight for months on end. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was that something.

There are many reasons why WCF excited me enough to write a book on the subject. Undoubtedly my focus on web services and interoperability is a driving factor, given that WCF has deep support for emerging web service standards (WS*) and can evolve with those standards through its extensibility. Another quality about WCF that impresses me is that it is a pure SOA platform—making the “service” artifact a first-class citizen and decoupling the development of services from downstream business components. Possibly the most compelling reason why WCF is attractive is that when you build a service, it can be used to perform classic client-server calls across process and machine boundaries ...