Whether or not you are getting certified, this book is excellent
I've been living and breathing WCF since it was Indigo and was pretty sure I could pass the 70-503 without any official preparation. However I figured better safe than sorry. If you're looking to pass the 70-503 this book alone will do it for you (I'm not advising against using other sources, I'm just saying that if you read it end to end and really understand the material, i think you'll be more than prepared for the actual exam). If you have no intention of getting certified but just want to learn WCF (or learn it better), again, this book will do it for you. Having read each of the WCF books on the market and having been involved with a few of them, IMHO, this is another book in a line of really great titles. The quality of pretty much any WCF book you can find here on Amazon is top notch, and this is no exception.
Overview:
-It spans just over 600 pages end to end.
-It's written by 3 authors, each of which is very experienced in distributed applications and is a very competent writer. Even though there are multiple authors, the writing style and presentation of the book is very consistent.
-Code examples are shown in both VB.NET and C#
-There are 12 chapters total, which average around 40 pages per chapter. A few of the chapters, like "Deployment", "Infrastructure Security", and "When Simple isn't enough" are a little shorter, others like "Contracts" and "Consuming Services" run a little longer.
-The depth of coverage of each chapter is really well done. I can't think of an instance where I felt I needed more or was begging for it to end.
-Each chapter starts out covering the topic at a more basic level and progresses to more advanced areas.
-There are several practice questions for each section and there are labs for each chapter as well.
Pros:
-Although it's a training kit, each chapter is very easy to follow and interesting
-The book makes copious use of Real World examples. Instead of standard Hello World type services, they use examples that are more typical of what you work with on a day to day basis. For instance, Chapter 4 uses Microsoft's MapPoint web service as the example base and doesn't rely on simple methods therein.
-There's a good amount of coverage in dealing with Non-WCF services.
-Security is a very critical area in building services and they cover it exhaustively.
-Concurrency (12) is covered more in depth here than any other WCF book I've read. I would add that for anyone who's focused primarily on building WCF services, this chapter alone justifies the price of the book. Coupled with Chapter 10's discussion on instancing, no stone is left unturned in this area.
-Every area of WCF is covered
-The length of each chapter's coverage correlates well with how important the subject is and how frequently it's typically used in professional development
-Both beginners and experienced WCF developers could read this book and find its information useful. There's plenty of coverage of the basics and high level items, but there's a tremendous attention to nuanced details that can make WCF development very frustration if you aren't aware of.
-Where possible, they discuss each way of doing something when more than one way is available
Cons:
-The discussion on security is very thorough and leaves nothing uncovered. Compared to the rest of the book though, it gets a little dry and tedious. To be fair to the authors though, the subject matter is inherently tedious and dry and I really couldn't say what could have been done to make it a little more lively. I think the only reason it sticks out as being dry is b/c the rest of the book is so compelling.
- The only other thing I think some might be bothered by is that this book is very much focused on real world development. The attention to detail makes it very obvious that the authors have dealt with WCF in and out and they put a lot of effort into warning you about pitfalls and everyday problems. If you don't care about learning WCF and only care about passing the exam so you can say you have the MCTS, you'll probably find this information to be overkill. However if you're taking this exam with the sole intent of passing it and not really learning how to build WCF apps, it's hard to have much sympathy for you and the authors would do everyone a disservice by catering specifically to such a small segment of people.
Speaking to the real world nature if things...the use of MapPoint as an example service is really a nice touch. It helps solidify one's understanding of interacting with a typical non-trivial service and vicariously shows how to handle many different situations. This book would not be the book it is without it. It adds a lot of text and material to study without specifically contributing to any given exam objective though. So this is why I say that someone singlemindedly focused on the exam might not like it but everyone else will find it a huge plus.
In the same respect, I don't recall seeing a single question about Installer packages on the exam yet there is roughly 30 pages dedicated to this subject (well, it's a little more broad than just the installer but the point is still valid). If you're only worried about the exam this would be of little value to you - if you're going to build WCF applications in real life, this will likely be very important to you. (There is only one knock I have on this chapter though. They go through building a Windows Service WCF host and building the installer. Other parts of the book emphasize the importance of using configuration for the services as opposed to hard coding such information. They don't however walk you through handling configuration files w/ a Windows Service. In their defense though - this would have absolutely nothing to do with passing the exam and everything to do with a real world problem).
Another example is with Chapter 9... titled 'When Simple Isn't Sufficient.' Calling this chapter excellent would be doing it a disservice. It's a catch all of how to deal with so many problems that aren't covered many places elsewhere or where technical documentation is lacking. Anyone building WCF services at work will Love this chapter. However there was minimal coverage of faults on the exam and that's about the only thing in this chapter I recall seeing on the actual exam. So is the material here needed for the exam? Not so much. Is it information every WCF developer should know? Absolutely.
So I guess my ultimate point there is if you're looking for a text version of a braindump - look elsewhere. If you're looking to build or strengthen a first class WCF skillset, buy it now.
All in all this is a very well done book written by people who know the material inside and out and took a lot of care in writing it. I know how hard writing a book like this can be and in every respect, the authors are to be commended on the job they did. It's a fun book to read, it's an informative book to read and I would go so far as to say that it should be on the shelve of anyone who's working on WCF development. It will get you through the exam and you'll enjoy the process. However as good as it is as an exam prep (and I don't want to diminish that at all), it's better as a solid WCF reference. To me, the true measure of a book is "would you buy it again if you lost it" and "would you recommend it to people on your team". I can answer both of those with a definitive Yes. Many of the pages are already dogeared even though I just got it, from making notes to myself and marking reference points in it. I've ordered a copy for each of my team members and have purchased three additional copies for some friends who I worked with on my last project b/c they are all die hard WCF junkies and I consider this a Must Have book on the topic.
Solid source to study WCF
I like this series of books (SPTK - Self-Paced Training Kit) because the short theory here is always ended with real world examples. And these examples shows how the product is used in the real situations, to solve the real problems. It is like the prioritization of the functionality.
In the WCF documentation on the MSDN there is no such prioritization, great list of the features is here and no clue what are the main features and what are the secondary, additional features.
In the SPTK books there are no place to all features, the goals of these books are different. There are only the main features and steps how they are used to get the real result. For example, the part about MessageContract. A lot of information are in the MSDN, but it is realy hard to understand what the purpose of the MessageContract is. The real world example is shown in this book, how to use the MessageContract to transmit the license key to the client. Short example gives us the understanding of this artifact.
I am working with Web-services more then 4 years, and last year mostly with WCF-services. I was using this book to review my knowledge to make it more systematic. I didn't use this book to prepare for exam ( See discussion about the sertification exams on the MSDN forums [...])
I use every information source to *understand* what is going on inside the product, why these features were included in the product, what alternatives were and are. Why so? Knowledge does not stucked in my brain without answers to this questions. I could not study the product in the *button-by-button* style as monkey.
I have to know *why*.
Teaching technics usualy use the patterns how the product should not be used, the samples of the improper practice. Usualy it is hard to teach proper technics without list the improper practices. Sometimes one sample of the wrongdoing is worth dozens samples of welldoing.
How does this series of books the SPTK is different from oother books published by Microsoft?
* Here are only described the *main* product features. These features were selected by Microsoft itself and it works as a unofficial priotirizing. It is very important.
* Here we see the *real world* problems and ways to resolve them with help of the main product features.
* In these books is the concisely description (and sometimes the history) what was the *source of these features*.
* Here we could see the samples of the *improper practice*, how the product should not be used.
Pros:
* This book is the Microsoft vision of what is the intend of the WCF, how the WCF should be used.
* The concise information about WCF is concentrated in the *Lessons*. The real world samples are placed near it. These samples are also concentrated on the main things.
* I very like the *Lesson Summary* parts. These lists are the lists of the *prime features* of the WCF.
Cons:
* Sometimes the book gives us the method in the samples that are obsolete. Say, the generation of the classes from XSD with XSD.exe utility. Several generation of the Software Factory could make this and SvcUtil.exe so.
* Sometimes the descriptions are not perfect. I have feeling that authors did not squeeze out the whole information from the BizTalk team :) and this is not surprize me because of the huge WCF feature pool. (For instance, we are asked on page.66 to comment attribute the [XmlSerializerFormat...] and regenerate scheams again, then make sure these schemas are going to get big differences from the default schemas. All these exisises with regenerating are useless without detailed explanations.)
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Conclusion:
I know several good sources of the information about WCF for deep studing.
* Samples in .NET SDK
* The Book "Programming .NET Components", 2nd Edition by Juval Lowy
* MSND forums (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/wcf/threads/ )
- and now this book is good addition to this list.
I mark this book with 5 stars.
It has flaws, but benefits of using it as a fast and reliable source to study WCF are great.
Best regards!
(2 reviews)
