October book review: Essential WCF

Steve Resnick, Richard Crane, Chris Bowen
Essential Windows Communication Foundation. For .NET Framework 3.5.

This is a well-organized and easy-to-read introductory book on WCF. It provides a thorough overview of the principles behind building and consuming WCF web services and includes real-world examples illustrating how to leverage WCF framework in your applications. The topics covered in this book include:

• Contracts: how to define complex structures and interfaces
• Channels: how to configure channels and channel stacks
• Bindings: how to choose communication protocols
• Behaviors: how to manage instances, concurrency, and transactions as well as how to add your own custom behaviors
• Serialization and Encoding: how .NET classes are serialized and represented on the wire
• Hosting services in IIS, WAS, and managed .NET applications
• Security options for authentication and transport- and message-level security for Internet and Intranet applications
• Integration with other frameworks such as WF and Silverlight
• Other topics: JSON, RSS/ATOM, peer networking, metadata publishing, diagnostics, and others