Introduction

• Harnessing a unified distributed programming platform
• Designing for service orientation

Developing and Consuming a Service

Programming a service

• Defining the service contract
• Implementing WCF Web services
• Applying contract and behavior attributes
• Controlling communication, transport and security using bindings
• Trade-offs between interoperability and performance

Hosting and configuring a service

• Selecting a host: IIS, Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) or a Windows service host
• Exposing Metadata to the client

Coding WCF clients

• Generating the client proxy and consuming the service
• Specifying client options via configuration
• Creating clients with the ChannelFactory

Passing Data Between Applications

Ensuring Web Services Interoperability (WS-I)

• Evaluating the need for interoperability
• Exchanging primitive and .NET data types
• Serializing business object classes with data contracts

Handling specialized messages

• Exploring SOAP formats
• Transporting binary data with the MTOM format
• Specifying a SOAP fault contract for exception handling
• Developing browser-friendly XML and RSS data formats

Securing WCF messages

• Leveraging transport and message security
• Transmitting data with SSL transport security
• Employing digital signatures for message security

Tracing the messages

• Adding a behavior to implement tracing
• Administering message logging

Guaranteeing Message Delivery

Building transactional services

• Flowing transactions from clients to services
• Automating commit and rollback
• Selecting a transaction protocol: OLE vs. WSAT transactions

Improving reliability and scalability with queues

• Configuring Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ)
• Building asynchronous services
• Handling intermittent service using queues

Establishing long-running services

• Persisting state with durable services
• Orchestrating complex business logic with Windows Workflow Foundation integration

Building a Secure Service

Enforcing Windows-based security

• Crafting a role-based security model
• Authorizing service requests declaratively

Enforcing security for external users

• Applying the WS-Security standards
• Connecting securely to external WCF services

Achieving Two-way Communication

WCF Message Patterns

• Comparing request-response and one-way messages
• Enabling WCF sessions

Supporting callback from clients

• Constructing a callback client and service
• Notifying connected clients

Configuring WCF Applications with Administrative Tools

Extending the service with behaviors

• Logging
• Error handling
• Security
• Performance counters
• Activation

Leveraging configuration tools

• Simplifying administration of security, network communication, transactions and queues
• Improving deployment and maintenance procedures