Getting Started with WCF (Indigo)

These days I am at a new project at a new customer after more than one year of rearchitecting and functionally porting an old VB6 solution to .NET 2.0 WinForms, and at the same time centralizing 88 client-server distributions to a single application server farm three tier distribution.

The new project is about creating an e-biz platform for providing services to partners and other systems; you know the buzz words: SOA and ESB. The solution will use Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to expose and host the services implemented using .NET.

I have found these resources to be useful when getting started with WCF:

• WCF at NetFXGuide: resources, articles, blogs, etc
• Learn The ABCs Of Programming WCF
• Security in Windows Communication Foundation
• Service Contract Versioning
• Best Practices: Data Contract Versioning
• A SOA Versioning Covenant

[UPDATE] Some more useful links:

• Service Station: The Service Factory for WCF
• Versioning web-services guidance
• Fundamentals of WCF Security (6 pages)

You should also download the WCF/ASMX Service Factory toolkit and guidelines ([UPDATE] v2 des-06), these add-ins to Visual Studio is invaluable to get you started. The toolkit automates lots of the plumbing by providing wizards that generates code following the design guidelines.

Btw, I will be at the DevConnections in Vegas next week. See you there =D