July 27, 2007

It is tough to be a technical author these days. If you give your readers too much general background on a given topic, they think you are weak technically, or worse, writing for managers.

Meanwhile, if you plow right into a topic at the most granular level, you quickly lose the set of readers that is large enough to make your book a popular success.

Which is all by way of lead-up to saying that Learning WCF by Michele Leroux Bustamante, a.k.a. Das Blonde, is available and stands remarkably balanced between generalist overview and detailist drill down.

If you have been waiting for the smoke to clear in the world of WCF [once known as Indigo] programming, you probably have not been terribly unwise. And if you are ready to set course for this new Microsoft framework, this is probably not a bad time. Bustamante's book stands as a ready guide.

Bustamante has been trawling the Microsoft technology waters for some time, and she recently has been deep into WCF training and writing. [We at TSS.NET are glad to say some of her WCF work has graced our Web pages.] The concrete experience of working with people, and knowing the questions they are likely to ask, informs this book, to great effect.

A downloadable chapter from the book's publisher O'Reilly gives you a useful introduction to WCF. While taking care of some important details, the chapter also puts WCF in the context of SOA, or Service-Oriented Architecture.

The folks at Microsoft are not too big on the topic of SOA - but, while honest advocates may differ, in its way, WCF is about SOA. It is a tentative answer to the question: Do we have to continue to reinvent the wheel and at what level? WCF can involve creating service contracts and services, although you do not have trouble finding someone to argue that and most other contrary cases when SOA is involved. Bustamante's perspective here is sensible and welcome.

Bustamente explains how you can work with Visual Studio templates in conjunction with WCF elements. And she gets into the nitty gritty, and, - again - the sometimes controversial, when she helps you understand how to generate proxies to invoke services.

For those who like some comprehensive background before they start bashing away with the bits, Learning WCF is a good starting point. Microsoft has released its share of technologies for distributed computing. Unabashedly, this one claims to learn from the mistakes of its predecessors. Microsoft developers who have put hard hours into learning those 'legacy' distributed methods are right to breathe deep before plowing forward again. So dig deep, and consider Learning WCF when making your trip plans. Below we point to a free PDF book chapter excerpt.

Download Book Excerpt, Chapter 1, Learning WCF, by Michele Leroux Bustamante, O'Reilly Media, 2007 - O'Reilly.com [pdf] http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101626/chapter/ch01.pdf

Learning WCF Catalog information O'Reilly.com http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101626/

Authors

Michele Leroux Bustamante is Chief Architect of IDesign Inc., Microsoft Regional Director for San Diego, Microsoft MVP for Connected Systems and a BEA Technical Director. At IDesign Michele provides training, mentoring and high-end architecture consulting services focusing on Web services, scalable and secure architecture design for .NET, interoperability and globalization architecture. She is a member of the International .NET Speakers Association (INETA), a frequent conference presenter, conference chair for SD West, and is frequently published in several major technology journals. Michele is also on the board of directors for IASA (International Association of Software Architects), and a Program Advisor to UCSD Extension. Her latest book is Learning WCF (O'Reilly 2007) - see her book blog here: www.thatindigogirl.com. Reach her at mlb@idesign.net, or visit www.idesign.net and her main blog at www.dasblonde.net.