Learning the basics of WCF [closed]

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

Learn the ABC of WCF: "Address, Bindings, Contracts".

Best is to look for tutorials on the Internet as they have mentioned above, and to then create your own Service, host that service in a console app and then use VS2008/10 Add Service Reference to create the client interface to your wcf service.

WHen you get the hang of things, you must definitely invest in either Michelle's book or Juval's book, they are the best in the industry.

There are a lot of information which can really make it difficult to learn WCF but focus on the ABC and start with a specific binding and address type and work your way from there.

Answer 3

Here are some good links:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/first-steps-with-wcf.aspx: Some cool videos here.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms734712.aspx
http://www.wcftutorial.net/
http://www.aspnet101.com/2010/08/windows-communication-foundation-wcf-tutorial/
http://aackose.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/basic-wcf-tutorial-for-beginners/

Answer 4

If you want to learn the basics fast (the ABC's), look at Dime Casts, WCF.

Videos (around 10 minutes each)

• Introduction to WCF: Creating your first service
• Migrating from .asmx web services to WCF web services
• Learn how to consume a WCF service
• Taking a look at how to separate out your WCF service project into multiple parts
• Adding IoC support to your WCF Services

That means you can have a good idea within an hour :) Epic win

Answer 5

The below link will be useful.

There is also a sample WCF Project Tutorial included which is meant for beginners

Link - http://softsprogrammer.blogspot.in/2014/02/wcf-tutorial-for-beginners.html

Answer 6

• First understand service orientation theory and why we need to rely so heavily on services in modern development. This study should include research into service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and how the SOAP protocol works at a high level. This should also cover how to effectively segregate your interfaces and what are appropriate levels of information. Keywords include: Coherency, consistency, cohesiveness, and designing for distribution.
• Follow this by learning the so called ABCs (Address, Binding and Contract) of the WCF framework, or stated differently the basics of WCF. Make sure you understand that a binding is merely a consistent, canned set of choices regarding the transport protocol, message encoding, communication pattern, reliability, security, transaction propagation and interoperability.
• Follow this up with a study of the hosting options in WCF. It includes not worrying about the creation and disposal of service, on-demand availability of web services, etc. But this approach has one major drawback in that protocols other than HTTP are not supported. WCF comes with the possibility of being invoked and used by protocols other than HTTP. So along with IIS, WCF can also be hosted in different ways so that its full power can be utilized (if required). Keywords here: IIS, WAS, and self-hosted Windows Services
• Then explore the various nuances of marking up the various contracts. This include the service contracts, data contracts, fault contracts, and message contracts. Tie this back to the understanding of how your markup will ultimately be translated to the WSDL contract and the XSD data contract types. You should at this stage also do some investigation into backward and forward compatibility.
• At some stage security will become a factor, so the next step would be to get comfortable with both message and transport security. At this stage it would be good to start tying your knowledge to the WS-* standards. More specifically the security standard.
• Follow this by a study of the different concurrency models and how to design WCF services for scalability.
• WCf is massively extensible and as such at this point start playing with behaviors and gain an in-depth knowledge of the framework's evaluation order.
• Play with service throttling
• Play with different protocols

By this stage you would be pretty proficient....