Book review: SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009 (II) – WCF Primer

This is a part of small posts reviewing the book ‘SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009’, by Richard Seroter.

Chapter II – an WCF Primer

The second chapter has been a little surprise for me: it is a WCF primer and has nothing to do with BizTalk Server. Why?

There are two reasons for writing a WCF primer when dealing with BizTalk Server: the first one is that WCF is not a “technology replacement for ASMX web services”, as a lot people see it. WCF is a communications subsystem. A full communications subsystem that most of future .NET developments will be based upon.

The second reason is that the new BizTalk WCF Adapter + replaces most of the old adapters found in common scenarios. WCF plays a very important role in BizTalk Server.

So, back to the Seroter’s book, how’s the WCF primer like?

It’s basically a very deep and detailed document about WCF. The chapter succeed in isolate the concepts of contracts, service implementations, bindings and service hosting. It also includes a detailed end-to-end sample including all the concepts. I’ll definitely recommend this chapter to anyone interested in learning WCF.