Professional WCF Programming: .NET Development with the Windows® Communication Foundation

Appendix B. Case Study

I always find it hard to include a case study in a book because in theory, a case study is supposed to provide a real-world example of the technology being discussed in the book. However the term real-world covers a lot of area, so answering the question "What should the case study be about?" can get pretty involved. Because WCF is primarily used for enterprise application development, walking through a typical e-commerce scenario seemed like the obvious choice. However, e-commerce case studies have been done over and over again and I wanted to do something that offered some new perspectives. In talking with some of my co-workers, I gathered some ideas and a couple of them stood out.

With all of the ideas being tossed back and forth, I remembered a case study that had been discussed in one of the early Indigo books. (Indigo, if you weren't aware of it, was the codename Microsoft gave the Windows Communication Foundation prior to deciding on a final name for it.) It wasn't quite real-world in the sense it was something a developer might typically encounter, but it certainly was very real in the sense that it used many of the WCF features that would be used in many typical applications.

After some thought, it came down to two case studies to pick from. The first option was a case study that employed a time-card management system used to track the time a given employee worked. The second was the earlier Indigo case study. I kept asking myself, "Which one of these ...