Customer Reviews

Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation Step by Step (Step By Step Developer Series)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book is both good and bad. The good is that the author is skilled at explaining complex material in simple straightforward manner and this is a rare skill for computer book authors. Also, the labs are more interesting than the standard "hello world" type of labs. However, like most of the WCF books out now, it is written for Visual Studio 2005 and for XP and not for Vista and Visual Studio 2008. The lab solutions don't even work. The worst is that the author and the publisher have no VS 2008 lab downloads or update notes. Some of the other authors have went to the trouble of doing that.

I've read quite a few books in the Step by Step series and am often a little frustrated with them. By their very nature, they walk you through specific scenarios and explain them to you. They typically do this quite well. And while I typically get a lot out of this, I often am left wanting for more. This isn't a knock on the series, it's just an inherent limitation. After all, no author can foresee every scenario a reader might have.

This book was a little different though.

The first three chapters were pretty typical in that they were the basic use cases you'd expect. THen you hit Chapter 4 "Protecting an Enterprise Service" and things get interesting fast. From start to finish, just about every single security question I had was answered here. Chapter 5 builds on it and expands the scenarios to the internet and by the time you get through those two chapters, you'll 'get' security and WCF.

The book then goes onto Service Contracts, State management, Transactions and Reliable sessions. I was a little underwhelmed with the discussion on Reliable Sessions but it was decent.

Chapter 10 goes on to using configuration to manage services and man, this really helped me to make progress. It's so easy to screw up simple things in configuration and end up hitting a wall, but this got me through it.

Chapter 11 goes on to discuss OneWay/Asyn operations (which is one of the more straightforward aspects of WCF). Nothing dramatic here but again, a pretty good discussion.

Chatper 12 goes onto Performance. Superb! Too often when I was learning the WCF, I was satisfied to get things working and didn't worry nearly enough about performance. Eventually though, you're going to have to deal with Performance and this chapter gets you there.

Another great touch was Chatper 15 - Managing Identity with Windows Cardspace. I'm not personally using Cardspace but this chapter was just plain cool and a great touch.

All in all, this is the best book in the Step by Step series I've ever read. There's some stiff competition to be the 'best' of the WCF books out there, but this book is definitely going to be a contender.

This book delivers just what it promises, a learn-by-doing, practical, hands-on approach to WCF. Uncompromisingly so, in fact.

A typical section consists of two or three paragraphs of introduction and theory, followed by five pages of step-by-step instructions for creating an example. The instructions are very detailed, on the level of "In the Enterprise Configuration console, in the File menu, click New Application" or "Press Enter to close the ProductsClient console". Sometimes more theory and explanations are strewn between the steps.

I found this to be a messy and occationally tedious way of presenting information.

You have to read through every button press of every guide, no matter how uninteresting the topic is, in case a precious bit of "why" or "when" has been placed there instead of in the theory section. Some elements, like the definition o a behaviour, seems to be missing entirely and is meant to be inferred from what happens when you change it.

Even for the interesting parts, the level of detail can make it tedious to follow. Fortunately, the resulting configuration XML is often listed after a handful of detailed button pushing steps. I often found the XML to be easier to follow (XML for "Set the security mode to Message and the algorithmSuite to Basic128" was easier to understand and perform than 11 steps in which "Expand the ProductsServiceHost project in Solution Explorer, right-click the App.config file and then click Edit WCF Configuration" was one of the shortest).

The information, however unstructured at times, is fairly complete and correct (as far as I can tell). Some books pretend to explain "SetFooSnafucationLevel" by saying "Sets the Foo Snafucation Level" (a blatant cop out), but this book does nothing of the sort. The author clearly knows what he's doing.

The book definitely has its market, but unless you're the pathologically practical type who likes very, very details instructions, you might not be it. The information is still there though, if you're willing to hunt for it.

I purchased this book to get a good base in WCF and that's exactly what this book gives you. It's straight to the point and the examples were easy to follow. You may require something further for more advanced concepts.

This is an outstanding book on WCF. It starts by providing an effective introduction to, and explanation of the need for WCF. It then does a nice job of truly taking the reader step-by-step through the various aspects of WCF, using solid examples and labs to assist in learning. I had taken a 5-day course on WCF ~18 months ago and summarily forgot most of what I learned since I didn't make use of it. While I expected this to refresh my memory, it went well beyond that.

I did run into a couple of issues. I found that I needed to know a bit about SQL Server to provide appropriate login and read/write access for the NETWORK SERVICE user on Vista. In addition, I experienced a little challenge in getting an SSL certificate working for one of the labs. Even taking those issues into consideration, the book is well worth getting if you want to learn WCF -- and if you are moving towards SOA in the .NET world, you definitely want to learn and use WCF.

One other caution. While the content is outstanding, my book had issues with some pages pulling away from the binding. This seems to be a manufacturing issue with the book that I received, so be aware of that when you use the book, in case the problem crosses over to other copies of the book.

I bought 2 other books on WCF and have scanned through a number of others and this one is, by far, the most useful and practical of the ones I have seen.

I especially liked the chapter on making your WCF service robust, providing what I felt was very practical advice for a production level service.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who is going to be building a production service and is just ramping up on WCF.

I am trying to follow the exact steps in the book in Visual Studio 2005 on Windows XP in mid-2008. The book was apparently written before VS 2005 was released. Many details no longer apply. You can't follow the steps, starting from the very first example. The Enterprise Library Configuration described on p. 8 has a screenshot that is not what the Enterprise Library 3.1 Configuration Tool looks like. On the next page, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 with .Net 3.0 does not have a template for a WCF Service Library, and there's no explanation for how to add it. It's just very discouraging to try to back into outdated instructions. Find something that applies to the current Visual Studio development environment if you really want "step by step" guidance.

I am so disappointed to this book. I thought that this book shall offer VB code samples but it does not. Microsoft book often offers both C# and VB code. However this book sounds like Microsoft book but it offers only C# code. It seems that the technical writers of Microsoft who knows how to create VB samples have all died because most of WCF books are C#. The governmental department I am working for is using Microsoft products and all of our developers are using VB code when we creating ASP.NET program. Disappointed very much about this Microsoft book.

This book starts with an excellent intro to WCF in the first 10 chapters and in the last 6 chapters goes deeper into the framework. I liked the smooth gradual increase in complexity and the completeness of the content coverage.

As I used VS2008 on Vista with Enterprise Library 4.0 the primers do not always work as described. I can see how a novice in .NET and ASP.NET might get really frustrated with the inconsistencies (primarily around UAC and the Enterprise Library), but for more experienced developers it would not be hard to figure things out after some googling, and learn quite a bit in the process. It'll be nice though if the author makes some clarifications and updates, and posts them to amazon or to MS Press.

This book is all about learning by doing. There is no fluff and useless rants. Highly recommended.

Normally I'm not thrilled with the "Step by Step" books from MS Press, this one is definately the exception. Though not every practice project worked "out of the box" the book details the "how to" create a WCF service in great detail with applicable examples in code. Very informative and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs to know how to get their WCF services up and running.

Things I liked about the book were the straight forward examples and explanations of how to setup and run a WCF service using many different hosting methods (IIS, Windows Service, and a Windows Host Application). The clear and concise explanations made a tough job a heck of alot easier.

Things I did not like about the book were the lack of explanation of "unexpected errors" you might encounter if you setup a test case incorrectly. The book could come a long way by including some of the common errors you're likely to encounter if you miss a step or your PC isn't setup properly for the example you're running.

Still, lacking that, this is a great book for getting started with WCF, I highly recommend it.