Essential Windows Communication Foundation (WCF): For .NET Framework 3.5 Book Review

If you are going to get into Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) with .NET Framework 3.5, you will want this book by your side. The authors do a great job of covering all the basics and then go in depth on each major WCF topic offering a chapter on each. They cover all the new .NET 3.5 topics thoroughly and in depth. They have an entire chapter on Workflow Services, which is new to .NET 3.5. They do a great job of explaining it from a WF viewpoint and a WCF viewpoint. They also have go into depth on using WCF for web (AJAX Integration, JSON, WebOperationContext, WebScriptServiceHost, WebScriptServiceHostFactory, RSS, ATOM) programming. One of the things I really like about this book is they way the authors summarized topics with tables. They make comparing options, which there are a lot with WCF, easier to pick. I know the big thing with WCF is that it brings a lot of different technologies together under one umbrella, but you still have to make choices on what to use and then how to use it. The umbrella does not make the choices any less confusing unless you have a good guide for making those choices. This book accomplishes that completely. An example can be found by going to the Amazon page that allows you to search the book, and searching on "Supported Features of Each Binding". Click page on page 117 and then check out the next page also. This book is very well organized, it is in depth, and the writing styles make it an easy read. There is no code to download yet, but I contact one of the authors and they said it is on the way. I highly recommend spending some time with this book before jumping head first into WCF. Using this book as a guide to help you make decisions about which path to take will make using WCF a pleasure.