Programming WCF Services, 2nd Edition

How This Book Is Organized

This book covers the topics and skills you need to design and develop service-oriented WCF-based applications, illustrating 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 focuses on the "why" and on the rationale behind particular design decisions. You'll learn about not only WCF programming and the related system issues, but also relevant design options, tips, best practices, and pitfalls. I approach 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 the insights this text provides, you can engineer your applications for maintainability, extensibility, reusability, and productivity.

While the first edition of this book was published in early 2007, it was actually based on material I had that dated back to 2005. This second edition has provided me with an opportunity to publish a further three years' worth of techniques, ideas, and helper classes, and even a few breakthroughs. I believe this new material will make this edition valuable even to readers of the first edition.

Over the past few years I have interacted with WCF developers on all continents apart from Antarctica, both while teaching WCF and designing systems. This has helped me immensely in finding ...