Published by Addison Wesley, Essential Windows Communication Foundation is authored by Steve Resnick, Richard Crane, and Chris Bowen and intended to provide developers with a roadmap relying heavily on sample code. With the release of the .NET Framework 3.5, Microsoft also overhauled its WCF APIs and web service infrastructure.
When asked about the features of WCF 3.5 the authors are most excited about they responded with:
I think the way WCF 3.5 supports REST-style protocols is pretty cool. To be clear, there are significant differences between SOAP and REST, where SOAP is primarily concerned with action (verbs) and REST is more oriented towards entities (nouns). But because of the “behavior” architecture in the WCF, the programming model doesn’t change much when you switch between the two. I find this pretty amazing, that you can switch between two architecture models (REST vs. SOAP) yet still code the same way for the other 90% of an application.
Read more of the authors' thoughts and gain access to Chapter 13 provided to InfoQ by Addison Wesley.