Learn how to build service-oriented applications with Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation. WCF is gaining popularity as a platform for building secure communications among systems in your organization or across the Internet. The second edition of this book provides a complete hands-on tour of WCF, including the improvements available in .NET Framework 4. Through labs, code samples, easy step-by-step instructions, and detailed answers to the most common questions asked by developers, you'll learn WCF's core concepts and features, including when and how to apply them. You'll quickly become productive in several areas, including: Contracts -- Learn to design service contracts, create data contracts for complex type serialization, and perform custom serialization to handle contract-first and contract-versioning scenarios Bindings -- Discover practical uses for each of the core bindings for intranet and Internet applications Hosting -- Learn the appropriate uses and benefits of several hosting environments, including Windows applications, Windows services, IIS, and the Windows Activation Service Instancing and Concurrency -- Configure services to run as singletons, to provide support for application sessions, or to run as scalable, sessionless services Reliability -- Apply features such as reliable sessions, distributed transactions, and queued messaging Security -- Learn how WCF supports fundamental security requirements for mutual authentication and message protection, and more Exceptions and Faults -- Learn error handling concepts, including debugging techniques, exception management, and fault contracts