Chapter 1, Working with Contracts, shows how we can use Contract in WCF service development, including use cases of ServiceContract, DataContract, MessageContract, FaultContract, and so on.

Chapter 2, Endpoint, Binding, and Behavior, focuses on the basic building blocks of a WCF service, including endpoint, binding, and behavior. The recipes in this chapter demonstrate how to create various kinds of services by using the proper combination of these building blocks.

Chapter 3, Hosting and Configuration, covers several common and useful WCF service-hosting scenarios, such as hosting a WCF service in a Windows service, IIS web applications, and a WSS 3.0 site.

Chapter 4, Service Discovery and Proxy Generation, covers how to discover and consume WCF services. Recipes here demonstrate various scenarios of generating a WCF service proxy and introduces the service discovery feature in WCF 4.0.

Chapter 5, Channel and Messaging, digs into the channel layer of WCF programming and shows how to build WCF server and client applications through channel-layer components.

Chapter 6, Dealing with Data in Service, covers various data exchange and communication scenarios in WCF development. Recipes here include how to transfer XML and raw binary data or ADO.NET DataTable objects in service operations.

Chapter 7, Security, demonstrates how to utilize the built-in WCF security features such as service authentication, authorization, identity impersonation, message protection, and so on.

Chapter 8, Concurrency, introduces some typical cases about managing the concurrency and performance behaviors of a WCF service, such as how to use throttling settings and how to use Visual Studio testing tools for service performance tuning.

Chapter 9, Extending WCF Runtime, focuses on how to extend the existing components in the WCF programming model, such as customizing the default ServiceHost, using MessageInspector or MessageEncoder to intercept messages, customizing the service authorization logic, and so on.

Chapter 10, RESTful and AJAX-enabled WCF Services, provides several recipes on WCF REST service programming, including building a standard REST service, building an AJAX-enabled REST service, and consuming a remote REST service from an AJAX client.

Chapter 11, Interoperability, shows how to make a WCF service or client work with non-WCF or even non-.NET platform-based applications (such as a WebRequest client, legacy MSMQ client, or Microsoft Office client).

Chapter 12, Diagnostics, introduces some useful tools and skills for troubleshooting and diagnostics in WCF service development, including how to capture WCF messages, how to debug a Windows service host, how to use WCF performance counters, and so on.

Chapter 13, Miscellaneous WCF Development Tips, provides some additional skills and cases in WCF service development such as how to generate and manage test X.509 certificates and how to build an RSS feed and routing services.