Programming WCF Services: Design and Build Maintainable Service-Oriented Systems

EDIT (2020): Microsoft has been migrating away from WCF for a few years because it’s not compatible with .NET Core. The official recommendation is now gRPC + ASP.NET Core. Good riddance.The synopsis claims that this is the "definitive treatment of WCF", will provide "unique insight, rather than documentation", and will teach "the why and the how of WCF programming". The book claims to be a guide on not only WCF, but SOA and programming in general. The Preface states the target audience is experienced developers with knowledge of basic OO concepts, .NET, and C# 4.5. After reading Chapter 1: WCF Essentials, Chapter 11: The Azure Service Fabric, and Appendix A: Introduction to Service Orientation, I disagree with these claims.As other reviewers have stated, the content of this book seems to contradict the synopsis. This is my first exposure to WCF and SOA, and even from the introductory chapter, the book makes many assumptions about the reader's familiarity with networking, services, web sockets, service-client interactions, hosting, and more topics which I consider well beyond the prerequisite "encapsulation and inheritance" knowledge mentioned in the Preface. I also disagree that this book could be considered an "authoritative guide"; each chapter merely steps through a concept feature-by-feature, providing isolated examples of each, without demonstrating any practical cohesion. This book has more features of a reference book, and a poor one at that considering the self-promotion and subjective slants that contaminate and dilute the core content. Anyone but a very experienced .NET web developer will have a hard time using this book as the sole reference for building applications using WCF.The writing quality leaves a lot to be desired. I've read books on data structures & algorithms that are easier to read than this book. This is aggravated by poor basic quality control: while I was reading the chapter on Azure Service Fabric without skimming, I found 5 typos over 19 pages: "you" instead of "your" and "programing" are two examples which I've submitted to the errata.The authors take every opportunity to promote their own code, touted as a "small framework that sits on top of WCF and compensates for some oversights in its design." This reflects the tone of self-importance that permeates the book. It's true that the authors have tons of credibility, experience, and professional recognition, but I'd rather agree with content (as I'm sure most engineers would) based on its demonstrated value rather than the authority of the author. I've looked at the ServiceModelEx code, but the issue is that there is no documentation in the source code and the provided PDF documentation is far from comprehensive. This means that the only way to truly leverage ServiceModelEx would be to attend the workshops run by their company.The MSDN documentation on WCF and Azure Service Fabric has better quality and practicality than this book.

I have been building web services in WFC for a couple years and my main sources of knowledge were: small introductory chapters in C#/.NET books, reading the code that my co-workers wrote, technical articles online and on MSDN, a book called "WCF Multi-layer Services Development with Entity Framework", which was more on the multi layer approach and EF than it was a serious book on WCF and finally Stackoverflow, which I find a major source of confusion and misinformation.Having to give a introduction to my team mates about REST, which included a historical background about other technologies/protocols like (RMI, DCOM, SOAP...etc), I just realized I had a knowledge gap and unanswered questions about WCF and SOAP and how they relate to each other which annoyed me a lot, plus the few books that I had sounded contradictory when they mention bindings, some add a few and others omit a few and they hardly agree on how many bindings are actually there.I decided to look again for a serious book about WCF and I ordered this one.So I am only 31 pages into this book and I got a clearer picture now and my questions have been answered. I am not sure if I will finish the book or go into all the details but just being able to see the big picture and have a clearer understanding of the main concepts is actually worth what I paid for the book.There is nothing like reading a good book.

This book is better than Lowy's previous book on WCF in it's depth and coverage. But, it still suffer's from the historical approach to WCF that has been tied to IIS and Web Services. WCF is a multi-function interprocess and Web communications center framework and not just a replacement for COM Services.I have almost every book(7) written for WCF and all of them ignore teaching interprocess communications, ethernet and replacement for basic services. The neglect is compounded by failure to demonstrate design of connection points for all types. This leaves the remaining text mostly as a self-serving treatise on the author's narrow specialty in using WCF. I would estimate that the general reader's needs lie far closer to needing interprocess, ethernet, and database connectivity.However, I find that this may be the best teaching source on WCF at this time.

Juval Lowy clearly knows WCF at a deep level. The prose in this book is readable, and at over a thousand pages, provides considerable minutia for developing WCF services while avoiding the WCF landmines. My only complaint about this book, and it is a big complaint, is it only provides small, mostly incomplete, snippets to facilitate application of the explanation. The book may have been much larger with more detailed samples, but also much more useful. As this book stands, it seems more a reference book for those who are WCF masters already. Although Microsoft is killing off WCF with neglect (as with so many of their once shiny technologies) WCF is still widely employed throughout businesses, and all that code needs maintaining. I doubt any more WCF books are on the horizon, so this is probably the best book we beginners can expect.

(I am copying my comments to another review to the top level)This is not a instructional book on WCF per se. It does add advanced knowledge that you will not find anywhere else. It is a mind expanding experience, but not a manual (although chapter one is knowledge that should be in any manual on WCF). The build up of ServiceModelEx is worth the price of admission even if the text is bit dry.Sorry Juval and Monty...it is thoroughly informative and kind of dry. I am very happy with the purchase (even if I had to wait 7 months for it to arrive) and will recommend it without reservation.

Interesting read so far. Dispelled some myths already from software developers I’ve spoken to

I have read articles and other books on WCF (i.e Learning WCF-by Bustamante) which were quite good. However this book is at a different level. Many of the technicalities of WCF which I have assumed to be working in a certain manner either were verified or not after reading the book. This book gives you a well organized insight into WCF and leaves little doubt about how the internals of WCF works. A great book to learn WCF, SOAP and more. If you are a developer doing Service Oriented Design, Microservice design or if you are an Intranet administrator this is the bible for you. This book will teach you the intricacies of WCF and ServiceModel, which is one of the best frameworks and tool that Microsoft has created. Thank to the Authors Juval Lowy and Michael Montgomery for this art piece.

L'ho acquistato perchè, pur scrivendo attualmente webservices solo in net core (oppure web api 2.2), mi trovo spesso ad interagire con services wcf (soap) che sono ancora molto presenti in rete. Il libro è molto dettagliato e piuttosto completo. Avrei preferito una trattazione maggiore del webHttpBinding (modalità rest) che può sempre tornare utile pur essendo oramai soppiantato da web api e net core webservices.

Dies ist das Standardwerk für alle, die SOAP nicht gleich mit schalen Serien im TV verbinden.Kein Werk für Anfänger, wohlgemerkt, aber eine gründliche Aufarbeitung aller Techniken, Methoden und Objekte, denen man beim Erstellen von serviceorientierten Applikationen begegnet. WCF hat eine lange Evolution hinter sich, von den frühen Anfängen mit COM+ bis zu einem vollständigen Framework für verteilte Applikationen.Basisbeispiele für einfache Client-Server Anwendungen gibt es im Internet zur Genüge, bei Löwy gibt es Erklärungen und Einblicke in weitergehende Techniken, Designvorschläge und wie man WCF Services mit Generics vereinfachen kann.Was man im Netz oft vergeblich sucht, findet man hier: Streaming mit WCF, Fehlerbehandlung, Synchronisation von Threads, Transaktionen, Queuing mit WCF, Sicherheit. Das Buch vermittelt Grundlagen, ist aber kein Einführungswerk, es bietet keine vollständigen Codebeispiele, ist aber für mich ein unverzichtbares Nachschlagewerk bei der täglichen Arbeit mit WCF.

Il ibro è fatto bene con molte informazione su WCF con anche delle importanti nozioni su Azure Service Fabric. Il libro secondo me da per scontato o già una buon esperienza da programmatore .net o conoscenza pregressa su WCF service. Il libro spiega bene i concetti ma presenta solo una dettagliata e chiara teoria sugli argomenti trattati ma non casi di studio. Ottimo come guida di riferimento o per approfondimenti.