Chapter six, Faults, explains how services report errors and exceptions back to their clients. It also discusses the best practices of error handling and how you can extend and improve the basic error handling mechanism. Chapter seven, Transactions, covers the motivation for transactions in general as well as the many transactional services.

Chapter eight, Concurrency Management, describes the declarative way WCF offers for managing concurrency and synchronization for both client and service. Chapter nine, Queued Services, shows how your clients can queue up calls to services, thus enabling asynchronous disconnected work. Chapter ten, Security, demystifies SOA security by breaking down this multifaceted task into its basic elements.

Appendix A, Introduction to Service-Orientation, will give you the background needed to understand the overall concept of this book and to expand to a more detailed description of SOA and how to implement it. Appendix two, Publish-Subscribe Service, presents the authors framework for implementing a publish-subscribe event management solution. Appendix C, WCF Coding Standard, is a consolidated list of all the best practices along with the do's and don'ts to help you get off on the right foot.

A couple of points about Programming WCF Services, first, this isn't a beginners book; the author dives down into advanced material in spots almost without notice. If you are uncomfortable with this you may want to start with a more basic attempt first, whether from the web or from another book. That being said, if you want to become proficient using WCF, you will be buying this book eventually. You will find that this book will become both a reference as well as well as a guide.

The book is well thought out and presented. Löwy places the focus on the how and why of programming WCF without the hype of the technology. He gives you information that is not readily available anywhere else, and has given well engineered examples that will provide you the correct methods of working with WCF.

If there was one thing missing to this book is a contextual reference for existing users of previous distributed technologies. That is background on how this relates back to Web Services, Remoting, COM etc. All pretty minor overall.

If you are serious about getting on the next wave of distributed SOA and Interoperability, then Programming WCF Services will take you to the next level. The book is filled with examples and will guide you along until you are creating professional WCF services. If you want to go to the next level of WCF then Programming WCF Services is a great place to get started.