Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is used to facilitate communication across platforms and network boundaries. It can be used to configure services and clients in any language, making it invaluable as a cross-platform tool.

 

Course series objective:

The objectives for this series go from the basics of WCF and configuring your first WCF client/service, and later explain how WCF can be customized and secured.

 

Target audience:

This series does not assume any prior experience with WCF; it begins with the basics. You should have an understanding of the .NET framework and working in Visual Studio to gain the most benefit from the courses.

 

Course sequence:

Course	Duration
WCF Jumpstart	1h 49m
WCF 4 New Features	2h 30m
Understanding Web Service Specifications in WCF	5h 44m
WCF End-to-End	10h 24m
Understanding .NET and WCF Transactions	1h 04m
Identity and Access Control in WCF 4.5	3h 12m
WCF Extensibility	3h 09m
Total	27h 55m

 

Course series description:

First you'll join Brian Noyes in WCF Jumpstart. This course lives up to its name with a basic introduction to WCF by way of creating services, hosting those services and taking a brief look at WCF security. In the next course, Scott Seely's WCF 4 New Features, introduces you to the features implemented in WCF 4. Some of these are updates to the configuration model and REST, as well as some routing updates.

Next, you'll join Mohamad Halabi for Understanding Web Service Specifications in WCF, and the title says it all. In this course you'll learn all about how to use SOAP and WCF for Web services. Following that, you'll join Miguel Castro for a look at WCF End-to-End, which covers WCF from top to bottom.

Now you should be feeling more comfortable with WCF, so the next course in this series focuses on WCF transactions. Mohamad Halabi's Understanding .NET and WCF Transactions also goes into the architecture behind transactions. Once you're comfortable with transactions, Dominic Baier will guide you through authentication on WCF 4.5. Identity and Access Control in WCF 4.5 gives you the knowledge you need to implement various types of authentication in your clients and services.

To wrap up your newfound WCF expertise, this series finishes off with Carlos Figueira's WCF Extensibility. In this course, you'll go over the various points of extensibility in WCF and examples of problems that you can solve by customizing WCF.