So I’ve started to get myself acquainted with visual c# for the purposes of getting some problems solved at work, personal development, and recreational passtimes (mainly developing games with c# and the xna api).
What I need is some guidance and direction on where to go next. I’ve got a decent handle on how the language handles object oriented concepts, and I have had no problems solving quandaries and getting things done so far. Heck I’ve even embraced WPF and made my applications a heck of a lot better looking and more interactive 
But I’ve come to the point where communication between applications has become critical and I’m feeling quite lost on how to deal with issues related to this task.
So my question is: where do I go from here? I’ve seen books on .net and socket programming for c# but they all seem to be very outdated. It looks like WCF seems to be the future of things - is that so? Would going the WCF solve my problems dealing with network communicaiotn between applications? I’m not doing high level , security requiring stuff mostly I deal with applications that need to do simple communication, passing of classes/objects, files (images, sound), etc. Basically what you would expect from simple game based communications and perhaps sharing excel data or statistical results over a local network.
Any help on topics I should study/focus on would be super appreciated!