SOA with .NET and Windows Azure Book Review

This book is a must have for anyone that wants to know what Microsoft technologies have to offer to accomplish Service Oriented Architecture. If you are a .Net Enterprise Architect, this book should not leave your side. It covers all the right ways to accomplish distributed application architecture and enterprise integration using .Net technologies. It is a book for both the beginner and the experienced. It covers SOA fundamentals in the beginning of the book as well as a history of legacy .Net distributed technologies. I enjoyed reading the history chapter. It brought back a lot of memories of COM+ and .NET remoting issues, which made me happy to be be using WCF. The book does a great job of covering WCF and WCF Extensions. After two chapters on WCF, it then covers .NET Enterprise Services Technologies. They include SQL Server, Windows Workflow, Application Blocks and Software Factories, and Biztalk Server. The book does a great job of showing why, when, and where you would consider using the technologies. There are several chapters on how to accomplish service orientation. Topics include Service Contracts, Interoperability, Coupling, Abstraction, Discoverability, Reusability and Agnostic Service Models, Service Composition and Orchestration Basics, Orchestration Patterns with Windows Workflow, and Orchestration Patterns with BizTalk Server. There also several chapters on Infrastructure and Architecture. Topics include Enterprise Service Bus, AppFabric Service Bus, SOA Security, Presentation Layers with .NET, Performance Optimization, and SOA Metrics. The book ends with several very helpful Appendices. They include an Industry Standards Reference, Service-Orientation Principles Reference, SOA Design Patterns Reference, and the Annotated SOA Manifesto. I found the coverage of topics in this book to be just at the right level for introducing them, and then showing how they fit into the .NET SOA environment. I will always have this book with me. It will not leave my side. It contains all the topics I need to consider when doing enterprise architecture. It will serve as a great one stop shop for solutions and ideas. My only disappointment was that it was in black and white. I own the SOA Design patterns book which is in full color. With the type of diagrams in these books, color does make a big difference in ease of reading and understanding them. It would have been worth paying an extra $10-15 bucks for the book in color. My other gripe is with Amazon. I had this book in hand for weeks because I ordered from the publisher before Amazon even had it available. Not sure where that went wrong, but it is no ding to the book. I am counting both of my dings against the publisher and not against the book. All in all you must buy this book if you are building applications with .NET in an enterprise environment. Even if you are building stand alone applications this book is worth reading. It has a ton of valuable information presented in a way that makes it unique to this book.