Books : MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-503): Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 Windows® Communication Foundation (PRO-Certification)
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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN num: 9780735625655
ISBN number: 0735625654
Label: Microsoft Press
Manufacturer: Microsoft Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 704
Printing Date: September 24, 2008
Publishing house: Microsoft Press
Sale Popularity Level: 11986
Studio: Microsoft Press
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Product Description:
Announcing an all-new SELF-PACED TRAINING KIT designed to help maximize your performance on 70-503, the required exam for the new Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) certification in Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). This 2-in-1 kit includes the official Microsoft study guide, plus practice tests on CD to help you assess your skills. It comes packed with the tools and features exam candidates want most including in-depth, self-paced training based on final exam content; rigorous, objective-by-objective review; exam tips from expert, exam-certified authors; and customizable testing options. It also provides real-world scenarios, case study examples, and troubleshooting labs for the skills and expertise you can apply to the job. Focusing on the Windows Communication Foundation, this official study guide covers creating, deploying, and administering services; defining service contracts; hosting services in managed applications and on Web servers; monitoring service health; creating service proxies; and consuming non-WCF services. Work at your own pace through the lessons and lab exercises.Then assess yourself using 300+ practice and review questions on the CD, featuring multiple, customizable testing options to meet your specific needs. Choose timed or untimed testing mode, generate random tests, or focus on discrete objectives. You get detailed explanations for right and wrong answers including pointers back to the book for further study. You also get an evaluation version of Microsoft Visual Studio(r) 2008 software and an exam discount voucher making this kit an exceptional value and a great career investment.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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I've been living and breathing WCF since it was Indigo and was pretty sure I could pass the 70-503 without any official preparation. However I figured better safe than sorry. If you're looking to pass the 70-503 this book alone will do it for you (I'm not advising against using other sources, I'm just saying that if you read it end to end and really understand the material, i think you'll be more than prepared for the actual exam). If you have no intention of getting certified but just want to learn WCF (or learn it better), again, this book will do it for you. Having read each of the WCF books on the market and having been involved with a few of them, IMHO, this is another book in a line of really great titles. The quality of pretty much any WCF book you can find here on Amazon is top notch, and this is no exception.
Overview:
-It spans just over 600 pages end to end.
-It's written by 3 authors, each of which is very experienced in distributed applications and is a very competent writer. Even though there are multiple authors, the writing style and presentation of the book is very consistent.
-Code examples are shown in both VB.NET and C#
-There are 12 chapters total, which average around 40 pages per chapter. A few of the chapters, like "Deployment", "Infrastructure Security", and "When Simple isn't enough" are a little shorter, others like "Contracts" and "Consuming Services" run a little longer.
-The depth of coverage of each chapter is really well done. I can't think of an instance where I felt I needed more or was begging for it to end.
-Each chapter starts out covering the topic at a more basic level and progresses to more advanced areas.
-There are several practice questions for each section and there are labs for each chapter as well.
Pros:
-Although it's a training kit, each chapter is very easy to follow and interesting
-The book makes copious use of Real World examples. Instead of standard Hello World type services, they use examples that are more typical of what you work with on a day to day basis. For instance, Chapter 4 uses Microsoft's MapPoint web service as the example base and doesn't rely on simple methods therein.
-There's a good amount of coverage in dealing with Non-WCF services.
-Security is a very critical area in building services and they cover it exhaustively.
-Concurrency (12) is covered more in depth here than any other WCF book I've read. I would add that for anyone who's focused primarily on building WCF services, this chapter alone justifies the price of the book. Coupled with Chapter 10's discusion on instancing, no stone is left unturned in this area.
-Every area of WCF is covered
-The length of each chapter's coverage correlates well with how important the subject is and how frequently it's typically used in professional development
-Both beginners and experienced WCF developers could read this book and find its information useful. There's plenty of coverage of the basics and high level items, but there's a tremendous attention to nuanced details that can make WCF development very frustration if you aren't aware of.
-Where possible, they discuss each way of doing something when more than one way is available
Cons:
-The discusion on security is very thorough and leaves nothing uncovered. Compared to the rest of the book though, it gets a little dry and tedious. To be fair to the authors though, the subject matter is inherently tedious and dry and I really couldn't say what could have been done to make it a little more lively. I think the only reason it sticks out as being dry is b/c the rest of the book is so compelling.
- The only other thing I think some might be bothered by is that this book is very much focused on real world development. The attention to detail makes it very obvious that the authors have dealt with WCF in and out and they put a lot of effort into warning you about pitfalls and everyday problems. If you don't care about learning WCF and only care about passing the exam so you can say you have the MCTS, you'll probably find this information to be overkill. However if you're taking this exam with the sole intent of passing it and not really learning how to build WCF apps, it's hard to have much sympathy for you and the authors would do everyone a disservice by catering specifically to such a small segment of people.
Speaking to the real world nature if things...the use of MapPoint as an example service is really a nice touch. It helps solidify one's understanding of interacting with a typical non-trivial service and vicariously shows how to handle many different situations. This book would not be the book it is without it. It adds a lot of text and material to study without specifically contributing to any given exam objective though. So this is why I say that someone singlemindedly ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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I like this series of books (SPTK - Self-Paced Training Kit) because the short theory here is always ended with real world examples. And these examples shows how the product is used in the real situations, to solve the real problems. It is like the prioritization of the functionality.
In the WCF documentation on the MSDN there is no such prioritization, great list of the features is here and no clue what are the main features and what are the secondary, additional features.
In the SPTK books there are no place to all features, the goals of these books are different. There are only the main features and steps how they are used to get the real result. For example, the part about MessageContract. A lot of information are in the MSDN, but it is realy hard to understand what the purpose of the MessageContract is. The real world example is shown in this book, how to use the MessageContract to transmit the license key to the client. Short example gives us the understanding of this artifact.
I am working with Web-services more then 4 years, and last year mostly with WCF-services. I was using this book to review my knowledge to make it more systematic. I didn't use this book to prepare for exam ( See discusion about the sertification exams on the MSDN forums [...])
I use every information source to *understand* what is going on inside the product, why these features were included in the product, what alternatives were and are. Why so? Knowledge does not stucked in my brain without answers to this questions. I could not study the product in the *button-by-button* style as monkey.
I have to know *why*.
Teaching technics usualy use the patterns how the product should not be used, the samples of the improper practice. Usualy it is hard to teach proper technics without list the improper practices. Sometimes one sample of the wrongdoing is worth dozens samples of welldoing.
How does this series of books the SPTK is different from oother books published by Microsoft?
* Here are only described the *main* product features. These features were selected by Microsoft itself and it works as a unofficial priotirizing. It is very important.
* Here we see the *real world* problems and ways to resolve them with help of the main product features.
* In these books is the concisely description (and sometimes the history) what was the *source of these features*.
* Here we could see the samples of the *improper practice*, how the product should not be used.
Pros:
* This book is the Microsoft vision of what is the intend of the WCF, how the WCF should be used.
* The concise information about WCF is concentrated in the *Lessons*. The real world samples are placed near it. These samples are also concentrated on the main things.
* I very like the *Lesson Summary* parts. These lists are the lists of the *prime features* of the WCF.
Cons:
* Sometimes the book gives us the method in the samples that are obsolete. Say, the generation of the classes from XSD with XSD.exe utility. Several generation of the Software Factory could make this and SvcUtil.exe so.
* Sometimes the descriptions are not perfect. I have feeling that authors did not squeeze out the whole information from the BizTalk team :) and this is not surprize me because of the huge WCF feature pool. (For instance, we are asked on page.66 to comment attribute the [XmlSerializerFormat...] and regenerate scheams again, then make sure these schemas are going to get big differences from the default schemas. All these exisises with regenerating are useless without detailed explanations.)
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Conclusion:
I know several good sources of the information about WCF for deep studing.
* Samples in .NET SDK
* The Book "Programming .NET Components", 2nd Edition by Juval Lowy
* MSND forums (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/wcf/threads/ )
- and now this book is good addition to this list.
I mark this book with 5 stars.
It has flaws, but benefits of using it as a fast and reliable source to study WCF are great.
Best regards!
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