Which book for SOA with .net?

Question

The topic of our undergraduate project is SOA. Under this project we are supposed to build 3 service components and one example website that uses those components. I am quite good with Java and have no experience whatsoever with C# or .NET.

We have decided to do project in C#.NET. I found SOA with .NET & Windows Azure by Thomas Erl. As we are not going to deploy our application to any cloud, I am bit worried about the book whose title has "& Windows Azure".

I am currently reading SOA Concepts, Technology and Design by Thomas Erl. Is the book SOA with .NET & Windows Azure right for my present needs? Or any other recommendations about book/blog etc on SOA with C#.NET?

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

Well, there's:

SOA with .NET

and the somewhat dated

The Complete Reference to Professional SOA with Visual Studio 2005

finally, the following may also be of interest:

Enterprise Services with the .NET Framework: Developing Distributed Business Solutions with .NET Enterprise Services

Answer 2

Have you considered using WCF for the communication layer?

http://www.amazon.com/Pro-WCF-Practical-Microsoft-Implementation/dp/1590597028

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-WCF-Services-Juval-Lowy/dp/0596526997

Edit: adding overview of WCF

WCF, or Windows Communication Foundation, is part of .net 3.0 and later which is designed to make it easy to build a service interface into any .net application. Instead of building a web service and deploying it to IIS (the traditional MS way of building a SOA), you can add WCF to a windows application or NT service and thus directly support a SOAP interface without depending on IIS. WCF can also be used for inter-process communication on a single machine, and it is the recommended replacement for .NET remoting.

I'm not familiar with the book you mention, but it does appear to cover WCF. Although, if you're not deploying to the Azure cloud, there may be a lot of Azure-specific discussion that will not be very useful to your current project.