Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Learning WCF
Comment: Great tutorials and help on author's website. Definately a book for someone who needs to start from the beginning!
Customer Rating:
Summary: This should be the first WCF book you get
Comment: You may want to acquire various other WCF books for depth, but if you're just getting started with WCF, this is the book you want. There isn't another book out there that compares to it. It's cleanly written and nicely balances conceptual material on service orientation with the practicalities of Windows Communication Foundation.
Many other books on WCF take the form of a "brain dump" on WCF features, or get bogged down in conceptual discussion of Service Oriented Architecture. Instead, Ms. Bustamante has a very clear, logical path from simple WCF features to more complex. You won't be overwhelmed early, but you will eventually get to most of the advanced features you'll likely need. Other books, such as Juval Lowy's Programming WCF Services (Programming), can pick up at that point for the really advanced topics.
Many of the chapters contain step-by-step labs, and you can get working end results from the author's web site. They start easy and build nicely through more complex concepts.
The sample code in the book is in C#, but if you happen to be a Visual Basic developer (as I am), you're not left out. Many of the labs and samples are also available in VB on the author's web site.
The book was unfortunately published too early to include definite coverage of the Visual Studio 2008 features for automatically generating some of the code you need to use WCF. Those capabilities are in the Visual Studio 2008 beta now and will be released in the next few months. Some of the labs could have been simplified by using those Visual Studio features. But, on the positive side, working through the labs in more detail will give you a more in-depth understanding of the subject and enable you to use the Visual Studio features more effectively.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Absolutely awesome
Comment: This is an absolutely awesome book for those new to WCF, experienced in WCF development and looking at tuning their skills, or trainers looking for quality material for their students (I used this book to prep for the Instructor Led Lab session I delivered at Tech.Ed Australia 2007 and I know the two attendees I gave copies too were also extremely impressed with its content).
Every topic discussed in this book is reinforced with hands-on-labs and code examples in both VB.NET and C# and Michele has also delivered a 15 part series titled "Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom" based on the book (see my blog at [...] for a detailed review of each presentation).
If you're serious about WCF, this is the book to get.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Greatest
Comment: This is the best book in WCF. The labs are extremely helpful. Concepts are clearly explained. "That Indigo Girl" did an excellent job on this one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The hands-on approach works!
Comment: If you starting out with WCF this is the book to get. It is very pedagogical and supplements every new concept with labs and samples that help clarify the ideas introduced. IMHO, the best way to master WCF is to read this book and then study some of the samples in the MSDN documentation. The only notion not discussed is PeerChannel but I hope we can get this in the next edition (hint hint). I am currently writing an online game server entirely based on WCF, and this book helped clarify everything i needed to get the job done.
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