This book covers the topics and skills you need to design and develop service-oriented
WCF-based applications, illustrating how to take advantage of built-in features such
as service hosting, instance management, concurrency management, transactions, dis-
connected queued calls, security, and the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus.
While the book shows you how to use these features, it focuses on the “why” and on
the rationale behind particular design decisions. You’ll learn about not only WCF pro-
gramming and the related system issues, but also relevant design options, tips, best
practices, and pitfalls. I approach almost every topic and aspect from a software engi-
neering standpoint, because my objective is to make you not just a WCF expert, but
also a better software engineer. Armed with the insights this text provides, you can
engineer your applications for maintainability, extensibility, reusability, and
productivity.
This third edition has provided me with several opportunities: first, to catch up with
WCF in .NET 4.0 with its new features such as hosting, discovery, and configuration.
Second, I wanted to present the AppFabric Service Bus, which is a fundamentally dis-
ruptive technology because of the sort of applications it allows developers to build.
Third, I have had two more years’ worth of WCF techniques, ideas, and helper classes,
as well as improvement of the ideas I had in the first and second editions. I believe this
new material will make this edition valuable even to readers of the second edition.
This book avoids many implementation details of WCF and largely confines its cov-
erage to the possibilities and practical aspects of using WCF: how to apply the tech-
nology and how to choose among the available design and programming models. It
makes the most of what .NET 4.0 and the service bus has to offer, and in some respects
is an advanced C# book as well.
Who This Book Is For
This book was written for two groups of web developers: those who are using ASP.NET
and would like to take their applications a step further through the Ajax technology,
and those who are using another technology but are interested in the ASP.NET AJAX
framework. It is also suitable for JavaScript programmers who would like to avoid some
of the headaches caused by the necessity of writing cross-browser code. The languages
used in this book are C# and JavaScript. If you need background on these languages,
O’Reilly has some solid introductions to both, includingLearning C# 2005, by Jesse
Liberty and Brian MacDonald, andLearning JavaScript, by Shelley Powers.
Introduction
This is an exciting time for developers using Microsoft technologies. A seemingly endless array of new
platforms, techniques, and tools is now available or will soon be released. The developer’s playground is
growing fast. One of the new platforms emerging from the think-tank at Microsoft is the .NET
Framework 3.0, a key component of which (and the subject of this book) is the Windows Presentation
Foundation (WPF). WPF provides both developers and designers with a unified platform for creating
rich-media applications that take full advantage of the graphics capabilities of modern PC hardware.
We’ve come a long way from the command-line interfaces of decades past. Today’s application user
expects a visually engaging and streamlined interactive experience due in part to their exposure to rich
media and content found on the Internet. WPF is all about creating a rich user interface that meets these
expectations, incorporating media of all types, such as animation, video, and audio. Furthermore,
through the use of a new markup syntax called XAML and a new suite of design tools called Microsoft
Expression Blend, developers and designers can now collaborate on projects seamlessly as never before.
Prior to WPF, designers would create graphical elements for applications and hand those elements off to
developers in the form of image files. Developers would then have to model a user interface (UI) around
them. Designers can now model UI using Expression Blend, save the design as a XAML file, and simply
hand the file off to a developer to code against in Visual Studio using WPF.
This book covers the concepts and components that make up the Windows Presentation Foundation.
You learn how to create a rich UI, exploring the various controls now available to you, and how to lever-age the new content model that WPF provides. You explore the WPF object model as well as the new
subsystems offered in WPF, such as the dependency property system and the routed event model. You
learn how to develop and deploy WPF applications targeting both the desktop and the browser. This
book also covers the new XAML syntax, which is a markup language used to define UI in your WPF
applications, regardless of whether you are developing for a standalone Windows-based environment or
targeting the web. Additionally, you learn the basics of working with Expression Blend, the new graphi-cal design tool offered by Microsoft.
WPF is a large platform, and we’ve tried to cover a wide range of topics in this book. Our intent is to
touch on a bit of everything WPF has to offer, so you know not only what’s provided by the platform,
but also how to utilize it. Of course, because it’s a large platform, we won’t be able to cover everything,
but we’ve tried to pick the essential concepts you’ll need to get started. We hope you find it both fun and
educational and that it provides a solid foundation for you as you venture in to the new world of rich UI
development using Windows Presentation Foundation.
Introduction
This book was conceived from a need to explain the MVVM pattern and how it helps structure WPF and
Silverlight applications. I had worked on a number of projects where these technologies were used but
general best practices were ignored because no one had formally explained the MVVM pattern and how
it compared to other patterns such MVP and MVC.
In Chapter 1, WPF and Silverlight will be explored in some detail and their respective features
highlighted.
Chapter 2introduces the foundation of the MVVM pattern: the databinding model that eclipses the
equivalent functionality of Windows Forms or ASP.NET.
Chapter 3explains why the model and the view must beseparated in an application and provides
various tips and tricks that can help achieve a strict separation of concerns.
Chapter 4introduces the ViewModel that sits between the model and view layers and mediates between
the two.
Chapter 5discusses commands and events, weighing up the pros and cons of each.
Chapter 6examines various options for implementing validation into an application.
Chapter 7explores the best side effects of the separation of concerns achieved through MVVM:
testability and unit testing.
Chapter 8outlines how to implement a Data Access Layer into a Silverlight or WPF application and how
the ViewModel can interact with this layer.
Chapter 9explains how to serialize an object graph using WPF and MVVM, as well as exploring how WPF
and Silverlight applications can be extended.
Chapter 10ends the book with a sample application thatties together many of the features covered
along the way.
About This Book
This book is an in-depth exploration of WPF for professional developers who know the .NET platform, the
C# language, and the Visual Studio development environment. Experience with previous versions of WPF
is not required, although new features are highlighted with a “What’s New” box at the beginning of each
chapter for more seasoned WPF developers.
This book provides a complete description of every major WPF feature, from XAML (the markup
language used to define WPF user interfaces) to 3-D drawing and animation. Along the way, you’ll
occasionally work with code that involves other features of the .NET Framework, such as the ADO.NET
classes you use to query a database. These features aren’t discussed here. Instead, if you want more
information about .NET features that aren’t specific to WPF, you can refer to one of the many dedicated .
NET titles from Apress.
