This book was poorly edited. After reading nearly every paragraph, I just want to rewrite it for readability. The book makes easy concepts difficult due to the writing style of the author. A sample sentence: "WCF provides you with a number of settings to implement fairly sophisticated means of applying network congestion detection,timeout intervals,retry counts,ordering,and so on." Lets see.. what? "...settings to implement sophisticated means of applying..."? This is a really simple idea that the author has butchered with his delivery. Another complaint: glossing over an idea, and then saying "It really is pretty much as simple as that." Well, which one? "really is" or "pretty much"? It can't be both. Just a case in point - this book went through no editing whatsoever.

I got this book, because I had learned WF from another book in the series which I thought was exceptional. This book has lots of examples, and it will be an excellent reference once I am done reading it the first time.

The language isn't as clear as the WF book, and there is an extensive use of "buzz words" to describe the advantages of SOA development in the early chapters that don't really give you a sense that you're learning anything.

In the end however, they manage to give a very concise, comprehensible rundown on what is a pretty complex subject. I would recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn WCF.

I must say that this book is not up to the standard I've come to expect from recent APress titles on .NET. I'd love to give you details, but the simple fact is that I haven't found it to be of much use as a reference.

While it could be a little better, I recommend Programming WCF Services (Programming) instead. It serves well as a reference and a reader.

I must say that this book is not up to the standard I've come to expect from recent APress titles on .NET. I'd love to give you details, but the simple fact is that I haven't found it to be of much use as a reference.

While it could be a little better, I recommend Programming WCF Services (Programming) instead. It serves well as a reference and a reader.

This book's puslisher cannot be Apress.

you don't buy definitely.You can read msdn instead of this book.

Finding couple of articles in MSDN Magazine will be much clearer than reading this book.

if only you realize this book is written by a group of so-called consultants in a single company that pushes its own product. you can do far better by browsing the free docs on msdn.

It gave me the rapid startup on WCF that I needed. All the other books prior to this one where out of date by 1+ years. This is the book that you want to get the rapid view of WCF. If you want a deep dive on "parts" of this, then Juval Lowy's book gives you details that are missed. There are a few details in Pro WCF that are definitely not in the MSDN documentation, but might be out on the web in a blog somewhere. So, you make the choice, but a book that brings it to you in a readable view with sample code, or go hunting an pecking - I'd rather save the time.
This book, while not 5 stars, is probably the best at giving more senior folks a rapid overview of major capabilities within WCF. It's definitely tailored towards more senior folks that don't want to sit and stare at 100% code or API documentation, but want to see the features used in scenarios that what we deal with each day in our enterprises. Mostly integration, using existing applications, as they're probably hosted in COM or Java/J2EE environments.

You know one thing that annoys me, buying a book that other people have rated '5 stars' only to find out that it is clearly not a 5-star book. Boy is this book not a 5-star book. After reading this book front to back in 4-5 days and learning a tiny tiny fraction of what I needed to actually implement WCF within an enterprise I decided to print out the documentation that comes with the Windows SDK and read that. Now I really know what it takes to implement WCF. I agree with other reviewers that have suggested that this book is light on content and heavy on fluffy filler. This book glosses so lightly over so many topics it's ludicrous. If you're desperate I'd suggest finding a white paper that covers the WCF concepts and architecture, then reading the Windows SDK documentation for WCF - you'll save $100NZD.

This is one of the better books that I've read about WCF. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to get an idea about WCF holistically. The book was able to showcase gamut of WCF capabilities and how to deliver them in real world applications.

Unfortunately this is a poor book, and if you are a busy person I would recommend you find something else, something that is well organised instead.

This book had poor organisation, lots of grammatical errors, and a ton of verbose blather with not much meaty info, and badly failed my signal to noise ratio test.
It would be possible to strip two thirds of the words out by reformatting concisely, as well taking out all the times the authors say 'as we are showing you'. I would certainly have appreciated it much more if they had been concise, as my time is precious.

I purchased this book along with charles petzolds 'Application = Code + Markup" and 'Essential WF', and both are excellent books. They are the standard I expect from 'professional' programming books, particularly ones with Pro in the title! They had a concise and structured presentation, good editiorial proofing and grammar, and gave me insight I could not easily get from MSDN.

To the authors: sorry to give your book a bad rap, but it's true and you can produce better work, I'm sure of it. Also, you should get a good editor, who will catch grammatical errors, and stop you being self indulgent and bring your focus back to what the readers want, which is not to hear you say hundreds of time 'as we are showing you'!

I purchased the book and looked it throught... Before ordering this book I read several articles on the net related to how to make basic steps in WCF and found, that WCF is easy ti understand.
I found almost nothing new to me in this book. I also noticed, that book structure looks a little bit following the structure of MSDN .NET Framework 3.0 WCFreference. Almost the same topics... Almost the same explanations...
Actually, no topic seemed to me covered completely in it. Just the common principles on how to work with WCF.

For example, speaking of Request-Response Contract types authors seem forgot to mention, that even if you write a void method without returning any value, WCF will create special empty value and use it as void method signature to wait from server.
Duplex contracts are reviewed in terms of P2P environment on unknown reason. Many questions are unanswered on this topic.
Versioning of Data Contracts is poorly reviewed.

The only question remained in my mind after reading this book is: is WCF really so easy to understand, or just the book and MSDN references are incomplete? :)

This book covers everything WCF. I could have done without the SOA introduction, only because I have heard it so many times before. That being said, it is a good introduction to SOA.

The book goes on to cover all the ins and outs of WCF. The book covers the WCF programming model, queue management, reliable messaging, transactions, and security. It covers each topic very thoroughly.

It is written in a very readable format and is definitely worth adding to your library.

Recently, I've set out to learn everything I can about WCF and this book has made the journey a lot more fun.

In short, the best thing about this book is that it answers just about every WCF question you've wanted answered. The MSDN documentation on WCF is pretty exhaustive, but in many cases, it's really difficult to find what you are looking for. Admittedly, if you follow it step by step, you can figure out the answers to most of your questions, but this book allowed me to bypass a lot of that. Case in point - MTOM. While relatively simple and straightforward, I couldn't find any MSDN examples on it and spent about 4 hours trying to get some simple attachments to work. After I figured it out I thought "Well I certianly made that a lot harder than it needed to be" and was annoyed it took me so long to figure it out. Well, MTOM is just one of the many areas this book covers and in 3 pages, you'll understand the bindings well enough to get just about any MTOM scenario you may have working.

Data Contracts are another great example. Not a hard concept by any means, but one you can find yourself stumbling through when working through more complex scenarios. The discussion on Data contracts occurs at multiple intervals, but right off the bat things get clear quickly and before long you get the feeling there's nothing you are unable to do with respect to data contracts.

Transactions are another area this book sheds a lot of light on. Obviously transaction support is vital in many service based scenarios and Chapter 9 of this book gets right to the heart of things.

I can't think of a single area that this book doesn't cover extremely well and most importantly, it's like they wrote it with real world developers in mind b/c their examples and discussion focus directly on many of those things that you need to do in your day to day job, but the WCF documentation on MSDN sort of glosses over. This isn't a knock on MSDN in any way, it's just that Peiris and Mulder really build on it they leave you wanting for nothing.

So far, this is the best WCF book I've come across and couldn't recommend it any higher.

Pro WCF is a good book for now.

WCF is Windows Communication Foundation. WCF is the next programming technology from Microsoft. Now WCF is available for download in Microsoft website.

Pro WCF is a good book for now. Like SOA, concept and technology of WCF is improving. Remember web concept and technology, first we have HTML, then DHTML, and now XHTML, AJAX, and so on! This book is good to start learning WCF for now.

Learn the new technology from Microsoft, get this book because it's valuable.

I have 2 questions concerning this early book on WCF. Please answer if you are one of the authors :)

What programming language is used in the book?
Is this book updated for WCF 1.0 release or is still in Beta?

Thanks, for answering.