THIS BOOK IS ABOUT Windows Communication Foundation in .NET 4.0. WCF is the technology in .NET that you use to build service-oriented applications, to exchange messages in various communication scenarios, and to run workflows built from service operations. With this new book you'll understand the principles of service orientation, learn patterns in communication, and discover how to declaratively define business processes. You'll learn the different parts of the technology to support these scenarios and gain a clear understanding of how the pieces of WCF 4.0 build upon each other to provide a comprehensive framework to support many aspects of distributed enterprise applications. Besides explaining the technical aspects of the WCF 4.0 stack, this book takes also a practical approach by showing three cases (service orientation, communication, and business processes) and implementing them step by step. The authors guide you in the practical aspects of developing with WCF and Visual Studio.
As you build your knowledge of the WCF 4.0 platform, you'll also learn how to effectively use Visual Studio 2010 to build solutions that maximize the new WCF 4.0 capabilities.
This book describes how to build (as a developer and as an architect) applications that integrate into the new programming paradigm in WCF 4.0. You'll also see how to set up a solution in this new architectural form based on WCF 4.0 as technology and .NET Services. You will learn how to solve actual real-world problems that you might experience when implementing WCF/WF 3.5 and the new programming paradigm and the new architectural styles needed for realizing WCF 4.0 projects. The examples shown in the book go beyond the "hello world" examples and guide you to an architecturally correct solution and provide a best practices–based coding guideline.
The authors are experienced in implementing the technology in real-world projects. They are faced with the problems in their daily jobs and come up with usable solutions combined with best practices and guidelines. They have applied this experience from real life to these chapters.
This book is for intermediate-level .NET developers and solution architects who are interested in using WCF 4.0 to build service-oriented applications, implement solid communications, host business processes, and enable secure and scalable integrations running in the cloud.
What you will learn in this book:
Designing services and using communication and workflow patterns in a correct and solid architecture.
Implementing the different WCF Bindings.
The benefits of the WCF 4.0 messaging enhancements.
How to instantiate services and work with proxies.
Different ways to secure the access to service operations.
How to implement WCF in a Service Oriented Approach.
Working with workflow services to organize business processes and create long running orchestrations.
How to build cloud-based integrations based on .NET Services.
How to create RESTful services and use them with lightweight clients.
You can start reading any chapter depending on your current knowledge of WCF 4.0, but we advise you to read them sequentially if you are new to the technology. Either way, Chapter 2 establishes the Car Rental Service implementation example. This is the foundation for many examples throughout the book, so it would be a good idea to familiarize yourself with Chapter 2 before diving too deeply into the other chapters.
Chapter 1 describes a number of principles and patterns on service orientation, integration and business processes and shows how they are related to WCF. It also discusses how you can use WCF to implement the patterns. This chapter is aimed at providing you with a more architectural background in the areas where WCF is intended for use.
Chapters 2 through 10 are about the technology itself, the APIs for developing applications, and ways to configure them. These nine chapters discuss different aspects of the WCF stack: Bindings, Clients, Instancing, workflow processes, security, and .NET Services. These chapters are aimed at providing the developer with the needed knowledge to start programming in WCF 4.0.
Chapters 11 through 13 show you step-by-step how to implement a complete solution in Visual Studio 2010. These chapters have a more practical approach and describe the way to develop complete solutions based on the knowledge you gained in Chapters 1 through 10. In these chapters you need to work with Visual Studio to complete a project as a solution for a given scenario. The code for these solutions is also available for download from www.wrox.com.
Each of these chapters deals with one case:
A SOA Case (Chapter 11)
A Communication and Integration Case (Chapter 12)
A Business Process Case (Chapter 13)
The final chapter of this book has a chapter about hosting. This chapter covers hosting in IIS/WAS and Cloud-based hosting. It also discusses how to track and manage endpoints with Windows Server AppFabric. This chapter also explains the routing service.
You'll need Visual Studio 2010 Professional and .NET 4.0 to learn WCF 4 and work through the examples in this book. You can run Visual Studio 2010 on Windows XP Service Pack 3 (except the Starter Edition), Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (except the Starter Edition), Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows Server 2008 R2. Your machine should have at least 1024MB RAM, preferably more.
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