My long awaited Jeffrey Hasan’s Expert Service-Oriented Architecture in C#: Using the Web Services Enhancements 2.0 is finally out. I wrote the following review for this book on Amazon. Expert SOA includes reference to my article on Evolution of Web Services in its appendix which is an honor. Thanks Jeff!
Practical, Developer Oriented and Contemporary!, August 2, 2004
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
APress Link
