This easy-to-use introduction to Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is ideal for developers who want to learn to build services on a company network or as part of an enterprise system. Built into Windows Vista and Longhorn, and available for Windows XP and Windows 2003, WCF provides a platform for service-oriented architecture (SOA) that enables secure and reliable communication among systems within an organization or across the Internet. With WCF, software developers can focus on their business applications and not the plumbing required to connect them. Furthermore, with WCF developers can learn a single programming API to achieve results previously provided by ASMX, Enterprise Services and .NET Remoting. Learning WCF removes the complexity of using this platform by providing detailed answers, explanations and code samples for the most common questions asked by software developers. Windows Communication Foundation (or WCF, formerly code name "Indigo") provides a set of programming APIs that make it easy to build and consume secure, reliable, and transacted services. This platform removes the need for developers to learn different technologies such as ASMX, Enterprise Services and .NET Remoting, to distribute system functionality on a corporate network or over the Internet. The first truly service-oriented platform, WCF provides innovations that decouple service design and development from deployment and distribution - creating a more flexible and agile environment. WCF also encapsulates all of the latest web service standards for addressing, security, reliability and more.

For intermediate to advanced system designers and developers, this guide introduces Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation for building service-oriented applications. Bustamante provides recommendations for specific scenarios relating to distributed communication, messaging, and web services; discusses the WS protocol support; and covers features of the platform. After background on Service Oriented Architecture, its four tenets, and how Windows Communication Foundation satisfies them, coverage is given of contracts, bindings, hosting, instancing and concurrency, reliability, security, and exceptions and faults. She does not cover all aspects of the platform in detail, discuss peer-to-peer communications, or give extensibility or custom channels a separate chapter. She uses interim versions of the next release of Visual Studio, and readers should be familiar with .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. Code samples and hands-on labs are incorporated. Bustamante provides training, mentoring, and high-end architecture consulting services and is also associated with Microsoft. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

This easy-to-use introduction to the Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation removes the complexity of using the API by providing detailed answers, explanations, and code samples to the most common questions asked by software developers.