Windows Communication Foundation: Unleashed

A new edition of this title is available, ISBN-10: 0672330245 ISBN-13: 9780672330247

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a new Microsoft technology for allowing software to communicate. Superseding earlier technologies, such as COM/DCOM, .NET Remoting, ASP.NET Web Services, and the Web Services Enhancements for .NET, WCF provides a single solution that is designed to always be the best way to exchange data among software entities. It also provides the infrastructure for developing the next generation of Web services, with support for the WS-* family of specifications, and a new serialization system for enhanced performance. For information technology professionals, WCF supplies an impressive array of administration tools that enterprises and software vendors can use to reduce the cost of ownership of their solutions without writing a single line of code. Most important, WCF finally delivers on the long-postponed promise of model-driven software development with the new software factory approach, by which one can iteratively design solutions in a modeling language and generate executables from lower-level class libraries.

Windows Communication Foundation Unleashed is designed to be the best resource for software developers and architects working with WCF. The book guides readers toward a conceptual understanding of all the facilities of WCF and provides step-by-step guides to applying the technology to practical problems.

• Introduces you to WCF and then takes you deep inside the technology
• Gives you nearly 100 best practices for programming with WCF
• Provides detailed coverage on how to version services that you will not find anywhere else
• Delves into using WCF together with Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows CardSpace
• Provides detailed coverage of the new high-performance data contract serializer for .NET
• Walks you through how to do secure, reliable, transacted messaging, and how to understand the options available
• Introduces you to federated, claims-based security, and shows you how to incorporate SAML and WS-Trust security token services into your architecture
• Provides step-by-step instructions for how to customize every aspect of WCF
• Shows you how to add your own behaviors, communication channels, message encoders, and transports
• Gives you options for implementing publish/subscribe solutions
• Walks you through how to do peer-to-peer communications with WCF

As evangelists at Microsoft for WCF, Craig McMurtry, Marc Mercuri, Nigel Watling, and Matt Winkler are uniquely positioned to write this book. They had access to the product as it was being built and to the development team itself. Their work with enterprises and outside software vendors has given them insight into how others see the software, how they want to apply it, and the challenges they face in doing so.

Foreword

Introduction

Part I Introducing the Windows Communication Foundation

2 The Fundamentals

3 Data Representation

4 Sessions, Reliable Sessions, Queues, and Transactions

Part II Introducing the Windows Workflow Foundation

5 Fundamentals of the Windows Workflow Foundation

6 Using the Windows Communication Foundation and the Windows

Part III Security

7 Security Basics

8 Windows CardSpace, Information Cards, and the Identity Metasystem

9 Securing Applications with Information Cards

10 Advanced Security

Part IV Integration and Interoperability

11 Legacy Integration

12 Interoperability

Part V Extending the Windows Communication Foundation

13 Custom Behaviors

14 Custom Channels

15 Custom Transports

Part VI Special Cases

16 Publish/Subscribe Systems

17 Peer Communication

18 Representational State Transfer and Plain XML Services

Part VII The Lifecycle of Windows Communication Foundation Applications

19 Manageability
20 Versioning

Part VIII Guidance
21 Guidance

Index

Craig McMurtry, Marc Mercuri, Nigel Watling and Matt Winkler work directly with the Windows Communication Foundation development team to tell the world about the technology.  As such, the authors have exclusive access to the very designers and developers that are producing the technology, as well as to early releases thereof.  That access provides insights into features and application of the technology that others do not have, as well as knowledge of how the technology will evolve, and familiarity with best practices that are only just being formulated by the testing teams.  More importantly, the authors devote their time to assisting enterprises and software vendors to adopt the Windows Communication Foundation, and that yields them significant insights into how others see the technology, how they wish to apply it, and the challenges they face.  The new material proposed for the second edition derives from their experiences since the first edition went to press.