Chapter 6, "Reliability," discusses those things that affect the overall reliability of an enterprise system. Features include reliable sessions, distributed transactions, and queued messaging. This chapter explains how to apply these features with WCF while providing guidance on when to use each feature.

Chapter 7, "Security," is a major feature in WCF and this chapter covers a lot of ground beginning with the fundamental concepts as they are implemented by WCF. You are then provided with scenarios for intranet, internet, partner or machine authentication with certificates, and federated security. You are provided with guidance while at the same time reducing some of the clutter surrounding implementation.

Chapter 8, "Exceptions and Faults," focuses solely on error handling concepts and debugging techniques. While some of these topics are covered throughout the book, they are looked at in depth in this chapter. By putting this chapter last you now have a better scope of WCF and will better understand the types of things that can go wrong and thus a better grasp on how to handle the problems.

There are also two appendixes; one that covers setup instructions for database configuration and setup, for ASP.NET membership provider model setup, and for working with certificates. The second covers Windows CardSpace to enhance the topic introduced in chapter 7.

I like Learning WCF on a number of levels. First it tackles the topic one at a time and lets you absorb the full impact of what you are learning. You are not bogged down with a digression in conceptual hyperbole about SOA. Instead you are given a clear logical path from simple to complex that lets you understand.

Next, I like the labs that many of the chapters contain in which you can get working results from the author's website. These too start simple and build to more complexity. Finally, although the book is written in C#, the author has provided labs and samples in Visual Basic as well.

While there is no doubt that there will be other books on WCF on the market — and that many of them will be good — if you are just getting started with this new technology or want to get a good foundation, then Learning WCF is a must-have. I highly recommend this book.