I have had some email exchanges with readers lately wanting to know how they can be sure they have the latest version of my Learning WCF book. The original book was printed May 2007, but I did a reprint for VS 2008 last summer which was printed August 2008. I thought it might be useful to post here how you can verify you have the correct text.

If you order a book from Amazon, Barnes and Noble or any other online book vendor you SHOULD be getting the new version of the text printed August 2008. It is difficult to see this clearly on the site because it will still say "Printed May 2007". The way to be sure is to view the print history page of the book and look for the ever so obscure [08/08] in the bottom right corner of this page. Here is a screen shot of the page with relevant sections at the top/middle/bottom showing. I was finally educated on these details of the printing process by O'Reilly so that I could help explain this to my readers...whew! Apparently only when there is a rewrite (as opposed to a reprint with minor changes) do they, and the bookstore, update the Printing History section both in the book and on the web sites.

If you are reading the book online at this site: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780596101626, you will always get the correct version of the book of course.

NOTE: For those who have the original text and are not planning to buy a new copy, remember that I posted the updates to Chapter 1 of Learning WCF here on my blog with O'Reilly's permission. Basically Chapter 1 was significantly changed for the labs, and some of the content was updated as well. That's because Orcas tools for VS 2005 were different than the released version in VS 2008. Mostly the changes help you with labs, and update instructions to refer to the new version of VS. The remainder of the book's labs have a set of startup files that I updated to work with VS 2008, thus, the Orcas/VS 2008 templates are not heavily used if at all. I did not have to update much else throughout the book.