Professional WCF Programming NET Development with the Windows Communication Foundation Programmer to Programmer



  • Part of the new .NET 3.0 extensions to .NET 2.0, WCF provides a unified platform for building and running connected systems and will be used by almost every .NET or SQL Server developer
  • Targeted to experienced developers who want to build service-oriented and transactional applications on the Microsoft platform that offer reliable and secure transactional messaging
  • Addresses the WCF technologies as well as the next generation of configuring and deploying network-distributed services
  • Key topics discussed include binding, contracts, clients, services, security, deployment, management, and hosting

User Ratings and Reviews

2 Stars Wrox has done better.
I am disappointed with the book as well. It has quite a few typos, errors, and many of the examples are just wrong. This book looks like it was rushed out the door with very little proof reading. Some of the chapters look like little more than rewritten MSDN reference material. Don’t waste your time; better references exist.

1 Star Just Plain Bad
Simply put, this book isn’t worth your time. Even as an experienced programmer I had trouble keeping up with the out-of-order explanations, typos, terrible examples, and incorrect walk-throughs.

1 Star The WORST book I’ve ever read
I’m still shocked how a book can be this bad! I think the only goal in the writer’s head was to publish this book as soon as possible to be one of the first books about WCF. The errors in the book are not only typos or overlooked stuff, the writer does not have a good understanding of WCF. In some parts of the book the writer copies some text from previous chapters as it is and forgets to change some of the words to suit the new subject.

I just finished chapter 6 in which I found a shocking fact! The writer tries even to cheat to make the example about Message Contracts work! The source code of the example (provided as a download from Wrox) is different from the source code he shows in the book. This is because the source code shown in the book would not even compile. So what he does in the downloadable source code is that he deletes the lines where the compiler gives errors and then the code does not even call the service! and to make the example look like as if it worked he just sets the string that is expected to be returned from the service on a label ,all that inside the client program! This really pissed me off! A book writer with such ethics?!

So up to chapter 6 I’ve found tens of errors (including errors about WCF principle) and a fake example! I wonder how much more is ahead!

DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS “THING” (I won’t call it a book)

1 Star Avoid this book
Started out learning WCF from scratch and was getting nowhere with this book. It doesn’t really do a good job of providing a conceptual framework to the reader. Provides a lot of API detail, but it leaves you wondering what in the world to do with it. O’Reilly’s Learning WCF did a MUCH better job of getting me started.

1 Star Terrible
Utter waste of money. Waded through all of it. Not well organized. At times incoherent. Often just a listing of classes and methods. Offers few insights. Lots of errors. Author lacks a clear understanding of the WCF or the true significance of some of the classes and methods. Read SAMS Windows Communication Foundation Unleashed, it’s much better. MSDN documentation is far better than this book.

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