How This Book Is Organized
This book covers the topics and skills you need to design and develop service-oriented WCF-based applications. You will see how to take advantage of built-in features such as service hosting, instance management, concurrency management, transactions, disconnected queued calls, and security. While the book shows you how to use these features, it sets the focus on the “why” and the rationale behind particular design decisions. You’ll not only learn WCF programming and the related system issues, but also relevant design options, tips, best practices, and pitfalls. I approached almost every topic and aspect from a software engineering standpoint because my objective is to make you not just a WCF expert, but also a better software engineer. Armed with such insights, you can engineer your application for maintainability, extensibility, reusability, and productivity.
The book avoids many implementation details of WCF and largely confines its coverage to the possibilities and the practical aspects of using WCF: how to apply the technology and how to choose among the available design and programming models. The book makes the most of what .NET 2.0 has to offer, and in some respects is an advanced C# book as well.
In addition, the book contains many useful utilities, tools, and helper classes I have written. My tools and helper classes or attributes aim at increasing your productivity and the quality of your WCF services. I literally developed a small framework that ...