My experience preparing for and gaining the TS Windows Communication Foundation Development 4 certification. The (~7 year old) WCF stack to my suprise, is much larger than I ever gave it credit for. 70-513 successfully pointed me toward a number of “off the beaten track” topics, so much so, that I actually quite enjoyed preparing for this exam. Lots of emphasis in the exam on topics such as routing, diagnostics, transactions, sessions and discovery.

When its comes to managing and supporting WCF services, like any software, having insight into erroronous situtions is essential. There are several ways to go about this that are specific to WCF, such as enabling a trace listener for example. A more customisable option involves fleshing out an IErrorHandler. As put by MSDN, provides the necessary hooks to run custom error processing logic. Allows an implementer to control the fault message returned to the caller and optionally perform custom error processing such as logging.

Autofac (a .NET IoC container) makes .NET code better. Simple. Controlling the way software interacts with it’s components (dependencies) is one powerful way to the increase its “bendability”. Bendability meaning how well a chunk of software is able to cope with change (this is inevitable). WCF’s unique object model (bindings, endpoints, behaviors, contracts, etc) can make doing IoC more of a challenge, however Autofac’s native WCF integration comes to the rescue.