Learning the basics of WCF [closed]

Question

For those just starting to learn WCF, what are the major/basic things I should look at and learn first?

What concepts would you recommend to learn first, to be productive in WCF?

What resources/articles/training/books would you recommend to someone learning WCF?

In C#, for example, one can learn LINQ at a later stage. Along similar lines, in WCF also there should be basics to learn first, and then later invest time in advanced features to enhance productivity.

Answer 1

The book I always recommend to get up and running in WCF quickly is Learning WCF by Michele Leroux Bustamante. She covers all the necessary topics, and in a very understandable and approachable way. This will teach you everything - basics, intermediate topics, security, transaction control and so forth - that you need to know to write high quality, useful WCF services.

Besides that book, I also really learned a lot from these two one-hour screencasts on WCF:

• DotNet Rocks TV Show #122: Miguel Castro on Extreme WCF
• DotNet Rocks TV Show #135: Keith Elder Demystifies WCF

Answer 2

I like this one: http://wcfguidanceforwpf.codeplex.com/

It's aimed at WPF developers who want to learn WCF, but I would recommend it even if you aren't that familiar with WPF either.

Also, I always suggest to people to use a tutorial that shows WCF working without using Visual Studio's "Add Service Reference," which is a tool in VS that you can point at a WCF or other web service and have it generate a bunch of foundational classes that help you connect to that service easily. Most tutorials will have you create a service and then create a client for that service using Add Service Reference, at least to start with.

I highly recommend a tutorial like the above, or this one if you want to start typing sooner (bugmenot.com has devx.com logins you can use if you don't want to register) that goes beyond that and shows you how to do it "by hand", because it really reinforces the core idea of WCF, which is that if an app wants to consume a service, all it needs to know is the ABC's: the address of the service, the type of binding to use, and the contracts (the methods on the service and the classes it uses as parameters and return types).

Also note that a lot of tutorials still out there are for VS2008. Not much has changed, but one thing that can confuse newcomers is that the XML configuration for bindings has been reworked in .NET 4 / VS2010 to make better use of defaults. The config files that VS 2010 will generate for you to start with are shorter than they used to be and look like they are missing required information, but in fact they are just using defaults.