WCF 4.0 Multi-tier Services Development with LINQ to Entities: Build SOA Applications on the Microsoft Platform With This Hands-on Guide Updated for VS2010

WCF is the Microsoft model for building services, whereas LINQ to Entities is the Microsoft ORM for accessing underlying data storage. Want to learn both? You would normally have to dig through huge reference tomes—so wouldn't you agree that a simple-to-follow practical tutorial on WCF and LINQ to Entities is the way to get ahead?

This book is the quickest and easiest way to learn WCF and LINQ to Entities in Visual Studio 2010. WCF and LINQ to Entities are both powerful yet complex technologies from Microsoft—but you will be surprised at how easily this book will get you get up and running with them.

Mastery of these two topics will quickly enable you to create Service-Oriented applications, and allow you to take your first steps into the world of Service Oriented Architecture without becoming overwhelmed.

Through this book, you will learn what's going on behind the scenes with WCF, and dive into the basic yet most useful techniques for LINQ to Entities. You will develop three real-world multi-tiered WCF services from beginning to end, with LINQ to Entities being used in the data access layer of the services. Various clients including windows console applications, the WCF Test Client, Windows Form applications and WPF applications will be created to test these WCF services. By the end of this book, you will be 100% confident that you know WCF and LINQ to Entities, not only in theory, but with sound real-world experience.

Master WCF and LINQ to Entities in a multi-tier WCF service by completing practical examples and applying them to your real-world assignments

What you will learn from this book :

• Create, host, and consume your first WCF service in just a few minutes
• Explore various hosting and debugging options for a WCF service
• Build a multi-tier real-world WCF service from scratch to understand every layer of a WCF service and apply it to your real work
• Add exception handling to your WCF services
• Understand the basic and advanced concepts and features of LINQ and LINQ to Entities
• Use LINQ to Entities in the data access layer of a WCF service
• Control concurrent updates to databases with WCF and LINQ to Entities
• Add distributed transaction support to your WCF services
• Test a WCF service from a console program, the VS2010 built-in WCF Test Client, a Windows Form application, and a WPF test client

About the Author

Mike Liu is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) for both .NET and Visual Studio 6.0, and a Sun Certified Java Programmer. He has over two decade's software development experience in several countries for various domains. Mike started using C# for production development back in the year 2001 when C# was still in Beta stage. He has authored a few books in Unix and Windows operating systems, with the latest one, Advanced C# Programming, being published in 2003.

Mike Liu holds a Master's degree in software engineering from Brandeis University. He is currently working as a Principal Software Engineer for a national student loan guarantor company in the United States, responsible for architecting, designing, developing and maintaining technical application architecture for the company. He is the lead for the SOA implementation team in the company, and has been involved in many aspects of the SOA realization projects including WCF and LINQ preparation, BPM selection, and ESB product evaluation.