Expert Service-Oriented Architecture in C#: Using the Web Services Enhancements 2.0

Rating:
Summary: Doing SOA in a Microsoft environment
Review: As Web Services start getting implemented, most of the work on understanding and implementing useful services has been dominated by developers in the Java/J2EE world. But Microsoft has built a parallel world around its C#/.NET platform. This book, then, can be seen as part of its response.

Hasan rolls out the now plentiful Web Services standards; like WS-Security, WS-Policy and WS-Addressing. He shows how these are implemented in .NET. But his book is more than a simple exposition of these standards. He puts all these within the context of a Service Oriented Architecture, where the programming language is (unsurprisingly) C#.

He tries a little re-education here. Many programmers meeting Web Services for the first time often have prior acquaintance with SOAP. What often ends up happening is that they then conceive of implementing a Web Service as a set of remote procedure calls, using SOAP to access the RPCs. Hasan shows that this is seriously non-optimal. Far better is a looser coupled message passing and processing design. It is within this context that most of the book is presented.

Along the way, he introduces WS Enhancements 2.0. This is used to define and deliver vital features for real world business applications. Features like secure messaging.

All that remains is for you to write an application.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding discussions of both SOA and WSE 2.0
Review: At the time of this writing, the two topics arguably getting the most press, causing the most stir and generating the most buzz for web services aficionados are service-oriented architectures (SOA) for general audiences, and more specifically within Microsoft circles, Web Services Enhancements 2.0. Author Jeffrey Hasan (of whose work I'm a big fan, notably for his work in "Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP.NET Applications" (...) paints a masterful picture of both topics in this outstanding work. This is a must-have if you've caught the WSE bug (pun accidentally intended) and need a practical guide to building better web services.

The material assumes a fair amount of .NET experience on the part of the developer, so the focus isn't on presenting exhaustive code examples and then describing them line by line; the intent is to give the seasoned .NET programmer a primer on how to make their apps more effective and more available to the rest of the world.

Using Microsoft .NET's associated technologies for XML Web services development, SOA is presented as being a maturation process for organizational web services, implementing a high level of abstraction, and therefore, a greater degree of universal appeal by promoting broad component reusability. WSE 2.0 is then tackled, diving into the major areas of consideration for SOAP messaging (security, encryption, routing, reliability, policy creation/enforcement etc.). Hasan describes the importance and role of SOA within large, disparate systems, preaching the gospel of interface-based systems and use of service agents (mid-tier objects managing communications between web services, business components and type/operation interfaces). This builds on the same concept discussed by Microsoft's Yasser Shohoud as a major building block for advanced web services development in his seminal book, "Real World XML Web Services" (...).

Hasan also offers a refreshing, pragmatic discussion on the debatable misconception of the true "benefits" of loosely-coupled web services within enterprise-grade distributed applications, presenting a decent case for tight coupling in certain situations.

The book's prime example of an evolving stock quote service is appreciated a lot more than weak "Hello World" examples, and discrete enough to exhibit most of the advanced features of WSE 2.0 with a SOA slant. Although one of the prime tenets for WSE 2.0 is to facilitate web services in a transport-agnostic manner, many of the examples are geared toward SOAP messaging using HTTP, to the enjoyment of ASP.NET developers - something that's largely missing in the market today, with many current examples being WinForms apps. Desktop developers may grunt at the lack of representation in the book's examples for using other protocols (i.e., TCP, SMTP, etc.), but it's a minor price to pay.

Also, the book does sufficiently and consistently make mention of WSE 2.0 development for those of us not married to Visual Studio .NET environments, even though the preference of the author appears to prefer using the IDE.

This book is wonderfully written, using a voice that makes topics that can be quite difficult to wrap one's brain around easier to grasp. The chapters are very logically arranged. However, the book's major selling point is the working code and practicality of its theories, boasting a heavy dollop of both that experienced devs will appreciate and quickly put to use. With only a sparse amount of syntax-centric documentation, Microsoft Hands-On Labs, articles, and in-print books available at the moment for WSE 2.0 programming, this book is easily the leading resource for concepts and code today on the subject.

On that note, the chapter on the future of messaging with Indigo was an unexpected but welcome treat. I also found myself using the book's appendix more than I do most, which consists of a well-rounded collection of top platform-neutral papers on WS-* initiatives. Very nice touch.

This is an advanced book, but not so far out there that a developer with a few months of .ASMX work logged won't be able to pick it up without sacrificing their social lives and/or sanity. The book's writing style, arrangement of content and oft-brutal honesty (i.e., working with X.509 certificates in WSE 2.0 is pretty easy, but still far from completely painless; VS.NET's Add Web Reference option can royally screw up your proxy classes, et al.) make this a real winner and a great addition to your library.


Rating:
Summary: Practical, Developer Oriented and Contemporary!
Review: Developing distributed applications has become an increasingly indigenous part of a present-day developer's software life cycle. XML web services provide us an easier and standardized way to facilitate distributed communications. Service orientation takes this to another level, i.e. standardizing loose coupling of these services via contracts. Hasan's book provides answers for today's enterprise needs to learn and formulate their existing distributed communication frameworks as they shift towards Service Oriented Architecture.

This book is about technology we can implement today; it's neither a superficial overview of terminologies nor is it a manager's guide or executive summary. Expert Service-Oriented Architecture in C# is the answered prayer of various developers like me who were looking for a book which comprehensively addresses SOA in Microsoft.NET and couldn't find much help. There are only a handful of books out there on this thriving discipline, Service Oriented Architecture, and most of them fall short in technical implementation details. Most importantly it answered my own skepticism of having another fancy TLA (three lettered acronym) and how can it change the way we program distributed apps today. You'll have to read it to get the answer. Hasan acquired Masters degree from one of the top 10 US schools and you'll see the academic excellence in his writing. His technical fluency, vocabulary and in-depth explanation are salient features what give this cutting edge technology book priority over its counterparts, if there are any.

Expert Service-Oriented Architecture isn't just a good read about SOA but as title depicts, also a great reference for WSE 2.0. Individual chapters are categorized in a way that each chapter covers a topic of interest; WS-Security, Policy Frameworks, WS-Addressing & Routing, Design Patterns and so on. Therefore it provides excellent reference for WSE 2.0, a fairly new release from Microsoft providing support for latest developments in Web Services arena. Examples in this book are simplified but not trivial, simpler but not marginal and the style shows them coming from a software developer who encounter real world application architecture challenges. Jeffery touched various important topics concisely which a developers encounters either in practice or theory; for instance RPC vs. document literal invocation, web services building blocks, digital signing with x.509 certificate, integrating web services and MSMQ, XML schema definition etc. The last chapter, beyond WSE 2.0, I found very interesting since it addresses Microsoft's new breed of communications infrastructure built around the Web services architecture code name "Indigo". WSE 2.0 is here for a relatively small period of time till indigo kicks in with support for secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability. However, future proofing the applications is what Hasan explained in this book and you have to read it to know it like Emerson said "Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them".

Rating:
Summary: Pulls Things Togther
Review: Hasan really wrote two books. The first, a practical take on building an SOA-based application (one hundred pages). The other, a "how to" use WSE 2.0 with explanations (two hundred pages). Well informed MSDN readers will not find anything new or exciting here. But what they will find is the all too many SOA ala WSE ideas collated and presented in one place.

I'd recommend Hasan's book to anyone with some knowledge of WSE wanting a "big picture".

Rating:
Summary: THE SOA Book to buy.
Review: I currently run a .NET user group so I know first hand that two of the most requested topics at my meetings are SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and WSE (Web Service Enhancements) version 2.0.

Unfortunately this demand is hard to supply because there are simply very few speakers or books addressing these topics. This book delivers on both topics!

First of all, the title of the book is right on the money. Jeffrey Hasan does a great job explaining SOA concepts by demonstrating how WSE 2.0 allows you to implement them. Most tech books I read are not balanced, either it is too conceptual with no implementation details, or it only has implementation details and doesn't flesh out the concepts. This book is very well balanced.

You do not have to be a web services guru to read this book but it certainly helps to have some web service experience. This book would be useful for any developer/architect interested in the details of SOA/WSE and the future promise of indigo.

A major bonus that is included with this book is over 20 pages of great references so that you can dig even deeper into the topics covered in the book. The only thing missing from the book is the CD with all of the samples included.

I found the book to be very readable, and does a very nice job moving you from the traditional web service, to a message oriented one and then finally to a service oriented web service. That section of the book is one of the best at explaining why simply having web services does not mean you have an SOA.

I would strongly recommend this book, and it gets my personal highest honor, which means it is carried in my laptop case, so I always have it.




Rating:
Summary: The Microsoft Approach
Review: The web used to be so simple. You had a bunch of pages, and like magic you could hyper-link to an entirely different page. Then it made a lot of sense to back the web site with a database. That way a standard page could pull up different data as needed. Kind of like this page, where the book title and description changes within a standard template.

Then came web services companies that supply some particular kind of service. The first of these (or at least the first that most of us got exposed to) were companies that checked, authorized and/or billed credit cards so we could do e-commerce. The companies in this business established standards. And now the world has established standards for such service oriented architectures (SOA). As of the moment the world doesn't quite agree on what these standards should be. Two of the standards are incorporated in IBM's Websphere, and the J2EE.

This book is on the Microsoft version on the way it should be done, called Web Services Enhancements or WSE and specifically the 2.0 version. If this is what you are thinking of using, or have been directed to use, this book provides a great introduction to the Microsoft approach. It a beginners book so far as SOA/WSE is concerned, but you should have some experience in .NET and in programming.

Rating:
Summary: a book for starters
Review: This book is not for who has gone through WSE2 samples shipping w/WSE2.

Rating:
Summary: Overview of Service-Oriented Architecture
Review: This book provides a very good overview of Service-Oriented Architecture in C#: Using the Web Services Enhancements 2.0. Mr. Hasan provides alot of background information and definitions for understanding the architecture and goes into detail about how the process works. I liked his writing style and ability to express these terms in a cohesive overview and explanation. I too like some of the readers would have liked to have seen a CD of code (I am a developer). I liked the discussion on security and that he alluded to the coming indigo development.

Rating:
Summary: More about WSE less about SOA
Review: This book serves as maybe a decent reference book if that. First off, its hardly about SOA and doesn't cover anything deep enough to really use if you are trying to get into it. The author right away breaks one of the major tenants of SOA, sharing types. If you are too lazy to search msdn or the Internet on basic .net Web Services then maybe this is a book for you.

Rating:
Summary: Practical introduction to WSE 2.0
Review: This is a tight, pragmatic introduction to using the new web services library in .NET. There are illustrations to guide you through but they aren't overused. There are some step by step walkthroughs, but in general the book is about code and a little about standards. The majority of the book is about the security aspects of the standard.

I recommend this book for anyone doing web services in .NET. It's definitely worth the look. It's the kind of book that you can read in an afternoon and get a solid introduction to the topic.