Hi,
Anyone have a good Windows Communication Foundation book to recommend?
Thanks
Andy
I have the WCF book by Juval Lowy, which I find quite useful. However, it's pretty dense, and isn't as helpful with the mountains of configuration information as you might hope. It took me (and others I know who've read it) a couple times through the book to really "get" the concepts.
Some other folks I work with use the book by Michele Bustamante, and they like it. From what I'm told, it's more of a "beginner" book that lays out things in a more step-by-step fashion. That's not to say it's not useful - just not as deep as Juval's book.
HTH
- Scott
Yes, the reviews said the same thing. There's another o'riely book which is aimed at beginning wcf. I think I'll pick up both.
So, between those two and the silverlight 3 book, I'll have lots of reading to do..
Yes, both books are O'Reilly books. And I didn't mean to suggest that Juval's book isn't complete - it certainly is. But his book is more of a reference-style book. You can certainly read it front-to-back, but I don't think that's the best way to do it. The first few chapters cover all the basics, and provide some very valuable best-practice information, so they are well worth a front-to-back read. But once you get past that, there's an awful lot more that you probably won't need to solve your problem. But the book sections are labeled well enough that you should be able to pick the parts you want to use and read those.
IMO, the biggest problem with Juval's book is that while he covers all the configuration options, there really isn't a section that says "if you're building HTTP-based services, this is the basic configuration; if you're building TCP-based services, this is the basic configuration", etc. This is supposedly the piece in Michele's book that is the most useful over Juval's book (I haven't seen Michele's book, so I can't directly comment.) Since Juval covers pretty much all of WCF, the relevant configuration information tends to be spread throughout the book. But I found that taking the "topic-based" approach with his book helped.
Those at my company who recommend Michele's book are people I trust, and I'm not trying to say one book is better than the other - just offering my experience in working with Juval's book. I'm betting that both books are good. I have had pretty good luck with O'Reilly books anyway.
What I have found in working with WCF is that while the basic concepts are relatively simple (if you've ever done any kind of service programming), it's the configuration that kills you. You don't find out whether you have a configuration error until run-time, and the exception messages are often less-than-helpful. Once you figure out the configuration, it makes sense - but getting there can be a real pain. At my company, we found that when we first started programming WCF services, we spent upwards of 80% of our development/testing time getting the configuration right. We now have configuration templates that we use, so developers down the road don't spin their wheels. But that 80% was pretty painful, and - at least in VS 2008 - the IDE offers almost no help.
HTH
- Scott
No, I never thought Juval's book would be incomplete.. just read that the first few chapters "review" the basics, not teach them. And for someone like me that knows what WCF and that's the extent of my knowledge, it might be too quick for me.
It sounds like having both books would be a good way for me to go, so I ordered them both.
I think one of the reviews for Juval's book likened it to Rocky's BO books, as far as the depth of knowledge goes, so that was a positive in my eyes.
I look forward to configuring wcf ![Wink [;)]](/emoticons/emotion-5.gif)
Thanks for the feedback!
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