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Tim Sneath : " It is with tremendous pleasure that I can reveal Microsoft Silverlight : our next-generation, cross-platform, cross-browser web client runtime. Silverlight (previously codenamed "WPF/E") is a lightweight subset of XAML for building rich media experiences on the web." Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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We are now moving into Center City and South Jersey . Take a look at our most excellent next meeting in Center City with my friend Walt on WPF. I am doing the South Jersey presentation on May 9th . Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Sitting here on Saturday morning with a nice cup of Kona coffee. There just is no better coffee in the world. Strong but deceivingly smooth. I really miss our former annual trips to the Big Island that we used to take with my Father-In-Law and family before he got ill. We used to go up in the hills and buy direct from the growers. Umm, nothing better. The coffee may actually help me get over my funk morning as there is now a lot going on my personal life but you know you never get to blog what really matters Agile/Extreme Programming/Tools While Steve was off having a baby , I went back into the team pairing full time for this Iteration rather than doing do the advance work on Workflow and stuff. It felt really good and of course it was a challenge for me, as many of the particulars of the system have changed since I last paired and I had to actually relies on my pair more. What floored me, even though it shouldn't at this point, is just how good this team has gotten. Every single person on the team could explain any place in the code at any time and we were able to evolve the design and code together. It still blows me away the power of pair programming BTW, we are working on our THIRD release of our Collateral Management tools and architecture to at least two Top 50 Banks! Ayende has released Rhino Mocks 3.0 , the premier Mocking solution on .NET IMHO He was also on .NET Rocks talking about NHibernate and Rhino Mocks Since he still had time after the last two somehow, he also put out an hour long screen cast about Rhino Mocks Jeremy is Code Complete on Structure Map 2.0 Financial and Banking Mike Walker announces the OBA Reference Application Pack for Loan Origination Systems (OR-Loss ). This is a lot of great stuff here Mike is also doing a Financial Services Unwrapped IV Webcast Workflow Paul Andrews blogs about the 3rd performance paper released for WF Sylvain blogs that K2 BlackPearl Beta 1 TR2 is available. BlackPearl is the version of K2.NET built on WF CLR/C# Read More...
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This is it, the big 150! The first New and Notable was on May 19, 2003 , (my first post was March 29, 2002 ) and I paid homage to the master, "I have always admired Mike's ability to look at the world out there and put it all into one great post, The Daily Grind . While I can't pretend to have Mike's writing ability, I would like to start moving to something similar instead of multiple seperate posts." I wish I had the discipline of Mike because if I posted daily I would be well towards 1000 instead of 150-) but hey I'm pretty proud of my record. I love this community and in the last 25 years this community (and Microsoft) have been real good to me and my family. I hope that what I have been picking here has been of good use to the community to keep you informed on key .NET activities as well as the architectural and design side. Thus, I go forth and pick: Entity Framework, ADO.NET 3, Orcas, MVP Summit One of the best writers in the community today is certainly Jeremy Miller . His latest post, MVP Summit Recapped: Linq for Entities, MonoRail, and Shameless Name Dropping , is a fine example of why. In one post, he is able to write quite elequently on complex subjects like the subtle design flaws in Entity Framework 3 and why WF 4 will rock your world. He is able to take a technology, stick to his design principles and stand his ground, educating and helping all involved achieve something better than was there before. He certainly wasn't the only one of us doing that but his post really captures the core design principles of no infrastructure code in business logic classes. Infrastructure is Infrastructure, business logic is business logic. We want the same thing: No marker interfaces, no codegen, no partial classes. Just plain "PO" and support for the Unit of Work pattern. David Laribee also talks on this area and makes clear that its a vision thing that doesn't really compare to NHibernate which is just OR/M; it's a full Read More...
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I have been working with the Office Live Services Beta for some months now. They just went live with my site over the weekend (although I still have to work on the domain name transfer) and it looks pretty good! I have a new Header and Home Page design. I have added my How-To STS/Window Authentication with ADAM/AD, Roles in AzMan with WCF to the refurbished WCF page . I added a new Domain Driven Design page under Software Engineering . My Presentations, as always are here . Hey, what else am I going to do while I am waiting for my flight? I would like and appreciate any and all feedback as comments here. What's good? What's bad? Knowing my blog and its subjects, what would you like to see? Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , Software Architecture , INETA , MVP , .NET Framework 3 , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Winter has finally set in with single digit temps and minus degrees wind chills but still no snow. WPF/Avalon Adam's WPF book is out and flying off the shelves apparently ! I have been looking forward to this one as his COM Interop book is the bible there. Feb CTP of WPF/E! New Docs, SDK and QuickStarts for the above Via Mike Harsh, Dave has put up a new WPF/E sample he built for a recent INETA talk that is a Reflection Editor .NET 3.0 Crash Course - Part 8: WPF Conclusion Tim Sneath , from the WPF Team, has been doing a series on great WPF applications that is up to 6. This hopefully proves that WPF is more than some pretty 3D demo thing and being used in real applications. #1: British Library Turning the Pages , #2: Electric Rain StandOut , #3: 90 Degree Radius Reports , #4: Otto , #5: TF1 , and #6: fnac.com LINQ/ADO.NET Orcas Entity Data Model 101: Part 1 Type safety - LINQ to DataSets Part 2 SOA As mentioned before, Dale Churchward is doing a series on "Proper SOA." He adds A Proper SOA is a Framework , A Proper SOA Must Work With Your Current Infrastructure and Legacy Applications , and A Proper SOA is Flexible Enough to Support Multiple Vendors, Software, and Hardware Harry on the Web Service Software Factory Kzu wrote a niece piece called " Building Software Factories Today " where he outlines some of the challenges and techniques you can use (and we will be using) to make effective factories on today's platform. [via Peter ] Financial and Banking Vertical/Architecture Mike has more on a topic near and dear to me: Software Factories for Financial Services Mike also shows how Microsoft is a clear leader in standards support for our Financial Industry. For us support for standards like SWIFT are critical BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT Architecture Nick says , "In think that one of the most valuable traits of an enterprise architect is the ability to push gently. In other words, if you find that a team is developing a solution that cannot be integrated or creates Read More...
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Way back on Sep. 7th of last year, I published an entry on writing your first WPF program on Vista . Now, that Vista is really out, and there is a ton of excitement about WPF on blogs lately. I spent about 4 hours this morning from 1-4 AM (yes that's when there's no kids!) setting things up and getting things working. This time, however, I to force myself methodically to go through excercises using the book Foundations of WPF: An Introduction to Windows Presentation Foundation . I felt that I was reading a lot of other books but sometimes I just need to force myself to go through some driven excercises to get it to sink in. I don't think I want to put in the steps here as that would just be the copyrighted material from Chapter 3 but the main difference for me is this first excercise had me using the Expression Blend product to design a WPF application that creates a slick UI on top of a SQL Server and displays bikes utilizing Data Binding. I found Expression Blend a much better experience for creating XAML UI's than Cider which is admittely not finished until Orcas. Some things to note: I used Tim Sneath's Building a Perfect WPF Developer Workstation to set up my Vista machine SQL Server 2005 Standard requires SP2 for Vista. I got it here (SP2 Dec CTP) I know this is not a real step-by-step how-to post but I'll have much more soon. Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Presentation Foundation , WPF , Avalon , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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We finally saw some snow here but it was under an inch. Today, my team has a release party. After 14 months and over 80 iterations, we have shipped on top of our architecture an enterprise collateral management solution and deployed in a large bank in Paris and London and they have accepted it. We have a lot still to do in essentially building the full portfolio of products on the new architecture that we had on the very old COM based one of the past but today is a celebration! Windows Workflow Mark has updated the source for WFPad to work with the latest WF. This is a must have if you are doing WF development Introduction to Hosting Windows Workflow Foundation [via Harry ] Provides an overview of how an application hosting Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) can manage and monitor running workflows and gives an overview of the runtime services and their out-of-box implementations. Managing Windows Workflow Events on a Web Server and More Managing Avalon/WPF An updated version of the Expression Design December CTP is now available that no longer expires at the beginning of 2007. You can download the updated CTP here: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/expression-design/free-trial.mspx Walt tells us the good news that the latest version of Reflector can disassemble BAML to XAML Mike Swanson returns with WPF Wizards, a Free DataGrid (!?), Improved Illustrator Export, and WPF/E Training WinForms Andrew points to some great articles on MVP in the context of WinForms: Dan Bunea Jeremy Miller Michael Feathers SOA/Architecture Harry points to his teammate Dale who is blogging about Proper SOA. He lays out 6 Proper SOA principles , and then drills into the first three: meets business needs , requires governance and responds to changing business drivers . Just Released! Enterprise Library 3.0 January 2007 CTP [via Mike ] ASP.NET/Web Scott Guthrie has announced the release of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 (formally known by the codename Atlas) Share this post: Email it! | bookmark Read More...
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WPF/Avalon One thing I had forgotten about in Avalon is the XAML Browser Apps (XBAPS) sandboxed in the browser. Karen Corby has two posts here on features and the second on security levels . [Found via Lester's WPF Blog ] One of the things I am looking at architecturally for 2007, is rationalizing the different code bases and development frameworks for UI (i.e. the grand convergence of the smart client and browser client). So in that, I would like to rationalize our WinForms/CAB code base and our soon to possibly be ASP.NET projects and have one WCF code base. So the question is; is it XBAPS or WPF/e? Walt reminds us all that there is no Cider goodness in the Orcas drop and " In the meantime, use the beta version of Expression Blend, to layout your controls. The Visual Studio 2005 extensions are very rough around the edges ." Yup. Sahil on WPF Freeable Objects Windows Workflow I talked about that WCF and WF are not at all currently integrated and how that will change in the Orcas timeframe. Microsoft has put up a sample showing how to use WCF from WF. [via Thom ] K. Scott Allan has a nice piece on Managing the Workflow Runtime from ASP.NET . WCF/Indigo Dominick Baier has an interesting post on ASP.NET Control for CardSpace WCF RSS/ATOM Endpoints for dasBlog Customizing the Metadata Resolver Architecture Welcome to the January 15, 2007 edition of Carnival of Enterprise Architecture. Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , Windows Presentation Foundation , WCF , WPF , Windows Workflow , Software Architecture , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Completely buried with two projects and the main one is going to CTP #2 at a major back in Paris/London next week so going to scrape this together quickly. I have also been pairing with Steve back on the main project on solving performance problems - yesterday, he and I optimized a section of the system where an operation was taking 25 to 30 minutes and got it down to 30 seconds! Now that's a good boost! I have much in my head concerning where we are at and my current feelings on being agile, architecture and such but they will have to wait. I tried to blog about the Apple iPhone announcement but couldn't muster up enough interest... Architecture and SOA, Agile SOA and BI Impendence Mismatch Arnon has great comments on a presentation (via Shahid Sah's blog) by Ron Jacobs on the Software Architect's Role. he says, "In this presentation, entitled Architects and the Architecture of Software , Ron compares the architect's role to that of an explorer, advocate, and designer," and "However, I would personally replace "advocate" with "mentor", and "explorer" with a "polymath" or "Renaissance" man. I'd also add a leader and visionary (although Ron mentions that as part of the discussion on explorer)." I agree with his additions, at least how I see my role. He also has some outstanding comments on Agile Iterations and what I really want to write about (and finding) when I have time: "To me, that is just a reminder why JEDUF is important. I find that in projects that are large or overly complex "sacrificing" one, two, or even three iterations for handling technical risks and forming a candidate architecture goes a long way ( and I don't care if this makes my project not agile. I am fine if it is pliant , lagum or what-not)." I am actually finding its quite a bit more than 1-3 Iterations depending on the project and environment. Actually this ties in with Jim's Design Maps . Cazz on Building Software Factories Today Richard Venyard on SOA Algebra WCF/Indigo Harry finds Indigo daunting Read More...
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A N&N from Brussels Belgium where I am up in the middle of the night (again I wake up at 3AM!) with my sleep hours all screwed up. I am enjoying my week here nonetheless. I don't know quite what to make of Brussels. Some parts remind me quite a bit of Paris but there is this weird mix of "modern" glass buildings although the style is a bit "older" than such US buildings. I don't know, I'm jet lagged and probably making no sense. The (potential) customer we are visiting is actually quite large > 3,000 employees most in one large building and I have been working hard on a "High Level Technical Document." Its' certainly some BDUF but this is a large SaS type architecture across 3 data centers that has many Enterprise issues (levels of Failover, SLAs, SQL Server Hot Mirroring, Perimeter Zone Security, etc. to deal with and get right. Anyhow, the food is good and there is a lot of espresso-). Architecture The Open Group (the TOGAF guys) has scheduled what appears to be an interesting conference on Enterprise Architecture and SOA in San Diego [via Architecture Blog ] Avalon/WCF Karsten gives an update on the North Face In Store Explorer WCF application that floored many of us at PDC05 and has now been deployed . He also reminds, "Note that the white paper written about this application is still relevant and worth reading. The code samples all work just fine on the final bits and have some useful code as far as state management, image montages and a 3D carousel." My good friend and fellow Smart Client track speaker, Walt Ritscher has started a new WCF blog at http://wpfwonderland.wordpress.com - Subscribed! Check out XAML to IL Explained Part 1 , WPF/e Example - Game of Life WCF/Indigo/SOA Nicholas Allan has his best of 2006 (and what a year it was for him/them!). Also check out Zen Faults Other Ted Neward has his predictions for 2007 , of which I mostly agree with all of them but one of the best qualities of Ted Read More...
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Steve has two posts. The first describes how I (and others) are pushing to integrate WPF into CAB on our project. The way I see it architecturally, is that we need to have the "Grand Convergence" of the Smart Client UI and the Browser based client built with the same exact framework with integrated support for media, etc. I see WPF and WPF/E as the solution for that and where we need to get to. We haven't been able to take that plunge yet as we have huge investments in CAB. Right now, our product uses a CAB based Smart Client that is configurable based on client needs but there is nothing in our WCF services layer model that mandates it. We could pretty much as easily substitute a ASP.NET client (and thats what I am doing on another project) and have it sink the same services. However, I would like to write the code once and utilize our large CAB investments. I haven't seen anything yet of PAG with CAB/Avalon although they alude to Avalon in the docs. In fact, CAB hasn't been updated since last Dec (besides SCBAT) - what's up y'all Peter and Eugenio? So, I am happy to see Steve discover the WPF layer for CAB project on CodePlex and maybe this will provide what we need? That's what I love about working with Steve. One or both of us finds these ideas, and when we disucss them, whether its through our blogs! or through lunch at the pub, we are always in sync, no need to ever play catch-up. Pair Architecture/Design? Also, Steve has a post on Increasing the performance of CAB and ObjectBuilder . So, TurboTax team in San Diego that wanted me to post on this subject should read the post. It looks like Steve dug up the CabGen and ObGen tools that are available in the latest drop of the Mobile Client Software Factory . You can read a little more about the reasoning behind the tools in Eugenio's " Notes on (extreme) Performance requirements for CAB " post. Good work Steve! We know where to go Monday now!! Share this post: Email it! Read More...
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I am SO busy with INETA trips and tons to do at work. Here is what I have stored up for the last week or so. WCF/SOA/Workflow/WF Tomas blogs about something I face every day in WCF with WCF ServiceHost Failures and IDisposable with "The "don't call Close()/Dispose() if faulted" behavior that ServiceHost requires does not work well with IDisposable; it demands a behavior different from the standard IDisposable pattern." We're having a lot of issues with dealing with failures and what to do with them but Tomas definetly states a fundamental problem. Tomas has also WCF, WF and BizTalk Sample Posted with some interesting stuff!! MTOM Interoperability between Oracle Application Server and Windows Communication Foundation Part1: From WCF to Oracle Jesus Rodriguez as well, " I am happy to see this progress: " The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) announced the publication of three new Working Group Drafts : the Basic Profile 1.2, Basic Security Profile 1.1 and the Reliable Secure Profile 1.0 Usage Scenarios. Advancement of these documents to Working Group Draft status is an invitation to the Web services community to provide technical feedback." I could just list every single post that Mike Taulty writes on WF; they are all that good! In particular, WF and Versioning , MetaStorm and the Workflow Designer , Little Workflow Foundation Sample I could and have done the same with "Nicholas Allen's" posts on Indigo: ListenUriBindingElement , Creating Faults Part 1, and Part 2 CLR How to avoid assembly loads , and Getting the list of loaded assemblies from Richard Lander James Higgs talks about Garbage Collection and the IDisposable interface WPF/Avalon Karsten has an awesome Avalon demo - "The Woodgrove Finance Application is a great demo of how WPF can be used to create better data visualization, in this case for financial data. I've posted the source code -- there are some good nuggets in here worth exploring." Introducing the XML Assembly Generator Data V1 of Data Read More...
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Some exciting announcements and tools from Microsoft today. Michael Swanson's got all the information here . Of big interest to me is the first Community CTP of WPF/E . Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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Lots of great stuff this time. CLR/Interop There has always been a ton of confusion about CLR assembly version numbers since 1999 and a lot of people don't understand all the different version numbers. Luckily, Richard is starting a series on them with the first being the Native File Version which of course has nothing to do with CLR Versioning. Back to Interop - Mike Stall wisely says Marshal Opaque Structs as IntPtr Instead of Byte[] Speaking of Mike, he's got a very good Table of Cool .NET Tools if you work at this level WPF/Avalon Mike Swanson lists More WPF Conversion Tools, Including VB6 to XAML Karsten s ays, "If you are a WPF developer, you must read Optimizing WPF Application Performance " Anthony clarifies the difference between Microsoft Visual Studio codename "Orcas" CTPs and "Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP". WCF/SOA/Workflow Pablo has three Recommendations to Design Message Contracts . I agree with all three. Number 1 about not including business behavior in the message but using simple DTOs across has been the hardest for us to achieve. Nicholas Allan (again!) on Proxy Bypassing Behavior The Sharepoint team blog has been having a series of posts on Workflow in Sharepoint 2007 Choosing the Right Microsoft Integration Technology [via Tomas ] Windows Vista/Office 2007 Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 has their Business Launch today. Here is the official site . Technorati Tags: Software Development , Avalon , Windows Presentation Foundation , Software Architecture , Agile , Agile Development , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , SOA , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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