Customer Reviews

Programming WCF Services

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I struggled between purchasing this book or Michelle's 'Learning WCF', being a developer for going on 20 years now I didn't want to get another beginners 101 book. Having read many articles and a few books by Juval and knowing I like theory not wizardry I went with Juval's.

I must say I am disappointed so far, in Juval's style of great theory he just jumps right in and you are pretty much in over your head off the bat. Not that you can't understand what he is saying but the way it is explained just doesn't help understand WCF in general. While I am only on chapter 3 I had to look forward and see that it only gets deeper, it seems to explain the pieces but not how they fit together.

I had to go back and look at the intended audience for the book. It says nothing about prior WCF experience just an experienced .NET, OO developer. I have been messing with WCF for a few weeks, played with WSSF, I have built a number of production web and windows service applications as well as worked with remoting quite a bit.

I bought the book to get more detail/theory but must say it has not helped me a bit thru chapter 3. The book hasn't provided any direction on putting this stuff together into a working example and I think that is what it is missing.

I have little doubt when I get over the initial WCF learning curve this book will be a great asset but for now I'm going to shelve it and look elsewhere.

This text (which I'll refer to as P) is one of the better WCF books, but there's plenty of room for improvement. The other reviews have plugged a lot of the strengths, so I'll keep this brief.

The real way to review this book is to compare it to the other leading title (Resnick's Essentials of WCF, which I'll call E). Since both books are missing a lot of information, but are in some ways complementary, if you read both, you get about 75% of the basics.

Organization: E is uniform and iterative, and provides introductions and summaries for those who read systematically. P is uneven and non-iterative. Some P chapters are strong, but E looks as if someone consciously went through the entire book with a fine-toothed comb (so to speak).

Transactions: E barely treats transactions, but P dedicates (IIRC) a chapter to them and takes a stand on using them in the design guide.

Hosting: The P hosting section is weak, and the coverage of WAS (which the author recommends for W2K8 deployments) is seriously deficient. Properly hosting and tuning a WCF application is half of the battle, and that battle is almost entirely left as an exercise for the reader. E does a much better job of explaining hosting, but, unfortunately, is also deficient in coverage. OTOH, P has an introductory section of using service host factories to gain some programmatic control over hosting from inside the app, something that E ignores. P also includes hosting advice in the nice guidelines section at the end.

Design: The P design standards section is a nice checklist, but it's not argued properly and it's difficult to find the rationale for some of the points made in the text. OTOH, E doesn't have anything like this. Anyone can read the MSDN/P&P literature on creating WFC services; what readers really need is an informed explanation of how to do it correctly. P takes a stab at it, but E doesn't. Neither text covers other important topics like testability, flexibility, and maintainability as they relate to WCF programming. Both books treat SOA and integration very superficially. P takes a basic stand on good contract design, but E doesn't.

Solution structure/VS project templates/etc: Neither book does a good job covering the different templates (WFC app vs. WCF service library), or how WCF layering should take place. P advocates putting "service logic" in a DLL, but that's about it. E ignores the topic.


Until the next version comes out later this year, I can definitely recommend getting P, but would also recommend getting E to fill in some of the gaps. It would be nice to see not only Lowy expand the design principles section, but maybe also make proper design a first-class component of the book (or maybe even publish an "Effect WCF" book).

I was a fan of Juval Lowys book .net components so when I wanted to learn WCF I got this book straight away. I found it very difficulty to understand in the beginning as I had no hands on experience on WCF. So I got the book WCF Step by Step by John Sharp and did the exercises in his book. After this when I read Juval Luvys book it makes perfect sense. So in short if you are a beginner to WCF this is not the book for you. Get hands on experience by coding some example, struggle through the configuration and errors and then if you want something to refresh your memory or add more theoretical depth to your knowledge read this book.

I am a Microsoft Certified Trainer, a real fan of Microsoft WCF curriculum, MSDN articles and the like, but it was not until I read Juval's book that I began to fully comprehend the importance and benefit of WCF.

I was never a com, Corba, or .NET Remoting programmer--never really understood all the flail about SOA, so I found the Introduction to Service-Orientation appendix exceptionally well written--for the first time I am comfortable that I understand the why-behind-the-how of SOA; Juval's isn't the first write up on SOA I have ever seen, but it was the first couched in terms that made me understand.

I am whipping the point about comprehending SOA because if you don't get SOA, then you don't get WCF; if you feel like a deer in the headlights when someone asks you about it, this appendix will be worth the cost of the book.

Sometime's too many choices leads to confusion, and that's certainly how I find the security options available in WCF; if you're struggling with security choices, you will find Juval's approach in the security chapter a welcome salve to that problem, for example, he offers candid assessments of delegation and impersonation that I have seen nowhere else.

The book did a superb job by way of example in making me understand how to best exploit the base classes that come with System.ServiceModel.

The WCF Coding Standard offered should be given an award for all the fantastic guidance it offers to those of us who are babes in the WCF faith-I refer to it constantly, and have used it as a baseline for my own organization's standard.

I read some of the other reviews before making my purchase decision... I noticed a few that claimed this book was too deep for those not already bathed in distributed computing experience--I disagree. While I have been programming for many years (Assembler, C++, Java, C#, more...), I have almost no distributed computing experience, and thanks to the advice of Juval and Michelle Bustamante (another great O'Reilly WCF book), I have successfully implemented the beginnings of what looks to be a rock-and-roll load-balanced WCF/SOA architecture.

While I have learned a great deal from Microsoft courses and sources, a fair measure of the credit for my present successes in WCF goes to these O'Reilly books.

I was trying to learn WCF for a few months. I was looking for a book that could provides me the detail of WCF framework from ground up, then I would move to WCF advance later - well might be from other book. I picked this book based on recommendation from my co-workers. I also owned "Pro WCF" from Apress publisher. This book has turned into great resource for me. It covered every detail of WCF from the basic concept of service contracts, hosting, addresses, and binding to higher level such as concurrency, or security. The author provided a lots of examples in depth explanations. It was great guide for WCF starter and good resource for advance programmer. It was much better than "Pro WCF"

One of the better technical books I have read. The writing style is very clear and complete. While some of the topics get really deep and complicated, author does an excellent job of keeping the writing simple.

Having now read both Michelle's book "Learning WCF" and Juval's book "Programming WCF", I can state that you need to start with Michelle's book.

Learning WCF will go through various scenarios (labs) on binding, behaviours, contracts, hosting, etc. and you will have a solid understanding and working knowledge of WCF.

Juval's book reads like a list of recipes without the instructions on how to mix the ingredients.

Juval covers the various topics (Services, Contracts, etc.), and lists the various settings, but there are no labs, there is no reference to the sample code, and no way you are going to learn WCF from this book.

I had been programming using WCF for couple of years before I picked up this book. To me, this is not a great beginner book; reading it requires some effort. However, the investment pays off. After reading most of it, I developed a great appreciation for the WCF architecture and its extensibility model. I continue to use this a reference for many advanced WCF items.

As a senior product architect, I needed to come up to speed on SOA and WCF and, although not a "Hello World" sort of book, this book did it.

I must have read half a dozen books on the topic, including Step-By-Step and Inside WCF, and this was by far the most deep and insightful (although those books are excellent, as well). I find myself rereading chapters to extract all the little jewels that you many not have noticed the first time through.

This is not easy stuff, however, so be prepared to do your homework and go through ALL of the code examples from the website. The download for the ServiceModelEx project contains great out-of-the-box solutions on all aspects of WCF and provides architectural techniques and insights to boot.

Between this book and all of the examples on the website, I have everything I need at my fingertips. No matter what other WCF books you feel would work better for you, this is still a must-have book for any library.

Juval, thanks for the great book and all of your insightful WCF articles on MSDN magazine.

As a programming guide this covers both the APIs in C# and the XML config file elements that you'll need to know to do intermediate level WCF. It is very thorough and a suitable book for those who want to go beyond the tactical act of creating a simple web service and instead want to understand the full capabilities of the technology and how to apply it. However, as I believe some other reviewers have commented, it glosses over most of the "how to" aspects of WFC as it relates to the Visual Studio, the compiler(s), WAS, IIS etc.. As a result it can be a hurdle to get a first library built and deployed in a real host to test the concepts that are outlined in the book. Ultimately you end up going to other resources or just trying things out in Visual Studio. To be clear there is lots of high level practical guidance on things like the advantages and disadvantages of WAS vs. IIS hosting but little if any how to information. The author could have written one chapter on "how to" type information for Visual Studio, IIS, and WAS and increased the size of the book by say 30 pages (maybe 50 with screen shots) and done everyone a big service. Also on a technology level I think that for a book at this level I would have liked to have seen coverage of the WebHttpBinding binding given the proliferation of REST/POX/JSON based applications today.