Programming WCF Services is the authoritative, bestselling introduction to Microsoft's unified platform for developing service-oriented applications (SOA) on Windows. Hailed as the most definitive treatment of WCF available, this relentlessly practical book provides insight, not documentation, to help you learn the topics and skills you need for building WCF-based applications that are maintainable, extensible, and reusable.

Author Juval Lowy, Microsoft software legend and participant in WCF's original strategic design review, revised this new edition for the latest productivity-enhancing features of C# 3.0 and the .NET 3.5 SP1 Framework. The book also contains Lowy's ServiceModelEx, a framework of useful utilities, tools, and helper classes that let you simplify and automate many tasks, and extend WCF as well. With this book, you will:

* Learn about WCF architecture and essential building blocks, including key concepts such as reliability and transport session
* Use built-in features such as service hosting, instance management, concurrency management, transactions, disconnected queued calls, and security
* Take advantage of relevant design options, tips, and best practices in Lowy's ServiceModelEx framework to increase your productivity and the quality of your WCF services
* Learn the rationale behind particular design decisions, and discover poorly documented and little-understood aspects of SOA development

By teaching you the "why" along with the "how" of WCF programming, Programming WCF Services not only will help you master WCF, it will enable you to become a better software engineer.