Learning WCF

How This Book Is Organized

This book includes detailed discussions, code samples, and hands-on labs. While the first chapter provides an important overview of the fundamentals, subsequent chapters each discuss more-specific related features. I recommend that you read Chapter 1 first, and after that, you can freely jump between chapters as your interest carries you. That said, I have organized the book such that each chapter uncovers another layer of complexity, so it can be helpful to read them in order.

Chapters Overview

Here’s a brief look at what you’ll take away from each chapter.

Chapter 1

Having started working with the platform very early on I became quite attached to the code name for WCF, Indigo. Alas, we all have to give up code names for product names eventually...but that doesn’t stop me from paying homage to it in Chapter 1. In this chapter, you will be introduced to WCF and the problems it solved for distributed enterprise systems, and learn how it supports Service Oriented Architecture. In addition, you’ll learn many fundamental concepts that will make you immediately productive with WCF, including creating service contracts and services, hosting services, and generating proxies to invoke services.

Chapter 2

This chapter focuses on contracts and serialization. It teaches you how to design service contracts, how to create data contracts for complex type serialization, and how to work with other serializable types to solve specific challenges, including contract-first ...