| | |  | Software Design, Testing & Engineering | Home » » » Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation | | | | | | | Description: | | Part of Microsoft’s radical new WinFX API is the foundation codenamed Indigo, now more formally known as Windows Communication Foundation. WCF is a topic in the same vein as our Jeff Hasan Service-Oriented Architecture book - a technology which allows web service developers to create services that communicate and interoperate with each other and other programs and applications. There are few books on WCF currently in existence, although there are some planned. WCF developers will be a sizeable audience, given their intermediate-advanced level of expertise and tendency to be early adopters. As there is a dearth of information currently available on WCF in book form, and that we plan to be one of the, if not the, first to market in this area, I suspect this book will quickly become both popular and successful. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Amit Bahree | | Paperback:
| 512 pages | | Publisher:
| Apress | | Publication Date:
| January 11, 2007 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1590597028 | | Product Width:
| 1.81 centimeters | | Product Height:
| 2.37 centimeters | | Product Weight:
| 0.02 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.2 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.0 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.2 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.75 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 17 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 17 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 29 found the following review helpful:
 Boy is this book not a 5-star bookApr 03, 2007
By P. Compton
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.
11 of 11 found the following review helpful:
 Not readable. Disappointment from Apress.Apr 25, 2008
By C. Cole
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.
10 of 12 found the following review helpful:
Is WCF so easy or just the book is incomplete...?Mar 04, 2007
By FractalizeR
"FractalizeR"
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? :)
13 of 17 found the following review helpful:
A poor bookMar 16, 2007
By Real world programmer
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'!
6 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Better books are availableJun 15, 2007
By Dennis L. Hughes
"Windows Programmer/Architect"
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.
See all 17 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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