Programming WCF Services, 3rd Edition

Foreword

Clemens Vasters

Principal Technical Lead,Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus, Microsoft

When Juval Löwy asked me to write the foreword for the first edition of this book, I was working in a Community Program Manager role for the brand-new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) framework at Microsoft. WCF was the result of a multiyear effort to write a unified communication framework for Windows. It was also the result of a multiyear effort to create an interoperable messaging standards framework centered around XML and the SOAP envelope model, with a common model for addressing; a transport-independent abstraction for session management and ordered delivery semantics; and a common model for message and session protection, for federated authentication and authorization, and for many more capabilities. This industry-wide standardization effort is still in progress with Microsoft and partners across the industry, refining and updating this common messaging framework (summarily nicknamed “WS-*”), more than 10 years after the SOAP 1.1 specification was submitted as a note to W3C, which started this process.

As I write the foreword to the new edition, I’m filling an Architect role on the Windows Azure AppFabric team at Microsoft. More precisely, I’m contributing to the architecture of the service bus, a service offering that’s part of the Windows Azure Platform and which Juval covers in Chapter 11 and the appendixes of this book. The way I commonly describe the effort of building ...