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I just wrapped up a week at SD West in Santa Clara where I delivered 2 full day tutorials and 4 sessions. This post will lead you to all the sample code for those sessions, enjoy! Tutorial: .NET Technology Roadmap The following link has instructions for machine setup, numerous references to resources, and code samples demonstrated: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/TechnologyRoadmap0308.zip Tutorial: Building an Enterprise SOA with WCF Most of the samples for this tutorial come from my book. Download those samples with instructions here: www.thatindigogirl.com . In addition I also demonstrated some newer samples including the following: Proxies: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/Proxies.zip Error Handling: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/ErrorHandlers.zip Routers: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/Routers.zip Entity Framework, AJAX and REST - A look at Project Astoria http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/ http://quickstarts.asp.net/3-5-extensions/ http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/EFDataServicesSample.zip Exploring Windows CardSpace http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/CardSpaceSamples.zip Federation with WCF Most of the samples for this session come from my book. Download those samples with instructions here: www.thatindigogirl.com . An additional sample: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/SecurityTokenClaims.zip Scalability and Throughput Considerations for WCF Most of the samples for this session come from my book. Download those samples with instructions here: www.thatindigogirl.com . Also see the my proxy samples: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/Proxies.zip Technorati Tags: WCF , Federation , CardSpace , Astoria , WPF , WF Read More...
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I could get used to this rolling out of bed into my office thing BizTalk Server The highly anticipated R2 release (the one with WCF Adapters) of BizTalk Server 2006 is coming real soon! Worldwide launches take place in September and October . WCF/WF Dr, Nick announces the WCF/WF/Cardspace Beta 2 samples , again, this time not pointing to the Beta 1 samples :) Sharepoint/MOSS Just Published: Major Update to the MOSS and WSS Downloadable SDKs CLR My friend Lutz updates the #1 tool in the .NET world, Reflector, for Orcas Beta 2! Stop what you're doing and get it! Along with that, one of the best add-ins, Reflector.Emit has been updated Another mastereful post from Joe Duffy: Thread interrupts are (almost) as evil as thread aborts Read More...
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So, since I am out here in Irvine CA for our annual meeting, and I have just pushed out a Plaxo update to everyone, I guess it's time to let you all know that I have joined Neudesic as a Principal Consultant II, heading/responsible for the Connected Systems/SOA practice for the East Coast. I will have a bit more to say soon. I would expect this blog to change focus to SOA, BizTalk, WCF, WF, and all Connected Systems especially in large Enterprise accounts that is now my respoinsibility to run and enable the growth of. We have a lot of openings for experienced people with at least 7-10 years experience and I have a team to build for the East Coast so contact me if you would like to be part of it. Read More...
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Agile/TDD/Software Development MbUnit 2.4 RTM Rhino Commons, Repository<T> and Unit Of Work Setting up Windsor for auto registration of components Acropolis Brad Abrams has a follow-up post that has a lot more information including videos, links and tutorials As I figured, my friend Brad Wilson says it nice and neatly: CAB is dead! Long Live CAB! Glenn follows that up with what you need to know to migrate from CAB to Acropolis ASP.NET/Ajax/Visual Studio ScottGu has been doing these great weekly roll-up posts lately; Here's one from May 31st SQL Server Katmai Yes, there is a CTP already [via Euan ] Ayende has a Developer's Perspective on Katmai Windows Workflow The Page Flow WF sample that Jon showed me is out. It is tremendously useful and includes some nice tooling Speaking of Jon, he posted the code for his WCF and WF session at TechEd Community Ayende quite correctly says, " It's Not a War, It's Not even a hot argument " in response to Kevin . As I said there , "I said something to the effect that there is no war, there is not even violent disagreement. There are passionate people that deeply care about their craft and like to debate ideas. I might see 'can't we just get along?' as just accepting the status quo. I think we should constantly question the status quo, step out of our comfort zones to learn from each other. I have learned a lot by Ayende's questioning personally. I know O/RM for instance is 'new' for many of us and it challenges many assumptions over the years that Microsoft (wrongly) told us over the years with SPs. As I have expanded my horizons, I have learned a lot with the daily use of O/RM in my project and it has changed a lot of what I assumed and knew." Technorati Tags: Acropolis , Agile Development , Windsor , MbUnit , TDD , ASP.NET , SQL Server , Windows Workflow Read More...
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I asked Tomas to expand on the details of the issue we faced last Sunday and it's this: What’s going is that you wanted to create a custom, reusable composite StateActivity-derived activity. While WF allows you to create an StateActivity-derived class, it restricts a bit what you can actually do with it. The core problem here is that the way you wanted to use the custom activity was similar (in a fashion) to building a custom composite sequence activity. That’s because when you create such a one (like with Add to Project -> New Item -> New Activity) you have full design-time support for creating your composite, including being able to drag & drop activities into the design surface, setting properties, and so on. Unfortunately, the way the ActivityDesigner is composed for the StateActivity class blocks this because it restricts you from modifying the custom activity at design time when opened “standalone”. In other words, it only allows you the complete design-time magic if the parent of the activity is a StateMachineWorkflow (or another StateActivity itself), which would only normally happen when you’re actually designing the real workflow, * not * when creating your composite. (I hope this is clearer, the terminology can get confusing at times). As you correctly pointed out, the way around this would be to create and attach a custom ActivityDesigner to your custom composite StateActivity-derived activity that didn’t have these restrictions. The reason why so much code would be needed, though, is that the corresponding StateDesigner class is internal, and so you can’t directly extend it and just override a couple of methods. Because of this, to accomplish this one would need to completely implement the designer almost from scratch (of course it would be possible, but nasty, to use reflector to grab the core code for StateDesigner and start from there). To be honest, a * lot * of people have complained in the WF 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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Yup, I'm still stuck in Seattle and I still feel like crap. Tomas just went off to the airport and I feel like the last MVP left in Seattle. Just want to get out of here and home but can't do that until tomorrow night. Lots of stuff stored up Entity Framework/ADO.NET 3/ORM/ASP.NET/MonoRail I consider my (and all the Code Better guys) biggest contribution to the whole Summit has been our conversations with the Microsoft Data Team on Linq for Entities . I would like to thank the Microsoft guys for being so open to feedback and understanding us In the meantime, Ayende went and did LINQ for NHibernate in his spare Time; does this man ever sleep???? Actually the second proudest moment came some of us CB bloggers with the special meeting with Scott Guthrie on how to make ASP.Net better support MVC much like Rails and MonoRail. My dissatisfaction with ASP.NET is well known and the reasons are expressed well by Ayende here on the leaky abstractions with WebForms and Jeremy Miller here . I expressed many times on my blog that I would just as soon go to Ruby on Rails if I had to do any Web stuff today. Several of the CB bloggers let me know about the goodness that is MonoRail. It's really awesome to see ScottGu have an MVC framework in the works as Jeffery talks about here Inheritance in the Entity Framework is the latest from the Data Team They also updated the 101 LINQ Samples that were included in the March CTP have now been updated to include the 101 LINQ to Entities Samples. To check out the newest samples download from here . Software Architecture/WCF/SOA Nice discussion from Harry on answering Dr. Nick's questions on SSB/WCF The Feb 2007 release of both the GAT and GAX have been released with Vista support but Harry has noted that you have to re-install all your guidance packages which is not so good Christian Weyer has some great slide decks from DevWeek 2007 Matias has an awesome post, " The holy grail of Enterprise SOA security " about SOA Enterprise Security using WCF Read More...
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In the last two posts 101 and 102 , I went pretty deep in some areas. I want to step back and do some more tutorial stuff. So the first question out of the gate is what is Workflow itself and where might you use it? In a nutshell, a Workflow describes and automates a Business Process. It can be described as a "reactive" program which tends to contain some traits: Workflow declared as a set of Activities Coordinates people and software Has real-world control flow Runs reliably and durably Tolerates dynamic change A Workflow is typically designed by a Process Designer using Business Process Analysis, Modeling, and Definition tools. That Process Definition is fed into a Workflow Management System. The WMS will have Users, Applications and Administrators/Supervisors. The WMS will present that Process Definition visually in some form and launch applications. From looking at workflows, we see that some challenges are present. Unlike non-reactive programs, workflows tend to be long-running and stateful. It may take 20 days for an order to be shipped for instance. There usually needs to be some controls to allow a person to override or skip a step in the workflow. Finally, we must be able to see into the workflow and see what state its in and visualizing control flow. Workflow is used in many scenarios like: Business Process Management (BPM) Document Lifecycle Management (Sharepoint, K2) BizTalk Orchestration Sales Management Line of Business Apps Many others... Enter Windows Workflow (WF). Unlike K2 and Sharepoint, WF is not a Workflow Management system or product. It is instead, a general purpose framework for building workflow into your own applications. It ships as part of the .NET Framework 3.0, and ships with both Vista and Longhorn Server. It is installable on Windows XP SP2 and Win2K3. Since WF is baked into Vista and later systems, and is a general framework, it is a single workflow execution engine for all Windows platforms. Indeed, products like K2, Sharepoint, Read More...
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So, last time around , I left off at the issue about my struggles with the ExternalDataService that ships in WF and purports to be the general mechanism to get data in and out of a workflow. Harry responded that he didn't like EDS and that I get real intimate with the WorkflowQueuingService that low-level communication infrastructure that ExternalDataService builds on top of. I also heard from Matt Winkler in email who pretty much pointed in the same direction, emphasizing that EDS is an abstraction that sits on top of a pretty basic queuing mechanism that you can program against and build on. One is not restricted to HandleExternalEvent, ExternalDataExchangeService but I would have to build the abstraction in the host to route the messages into the queue, and then have activities that wait on the queue. The first point of this post is to make my readers aware of this option and the documented EDS is not the only option for data in/out. One of the other main areas is WCF Integration, which actually can be achieved on top of the WorkflowQueuingService . We (at work) will not be able to use Orcas as our workflow deliverables are by this August and banks will not accept 3.5 for quite some time (if not years). So I have to build my own WCF/WF Integration. The first place I looked was the WCF Activities for WF project on CodePlex . This excellent project by Marcel builds a necessary infrastructure. For instance, there is an base InputActivity class that implements the IEventActivity Interface for event-driven activities. /// <summary> /// Base class for activities that dequeue data from a workflow queue /// </summary> public abstract class InputActivity : Activity , IEventActivity , IActivityEventListener < QueueEventArgs > { That class provides an abstraction over the queues and events. From there, you can derive a WCFInputActivity. It looks like good stuff that I can use. Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , Financial and Banking Read More...
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Still real tired from my Oklahoma trip , partying with Raymond sure is exhausting-). Agile/Development Tools On my short list for some time now, is to switch from NUnit to the definitely superior MbUnit. My friend Andrew has done some great work with this tool and he has a new release out with the beta 1 release of MbUnit 2.4. New features in this drop. I really need to switch and get my team to switch over. It's just been an inertia thing with NUNit as I knew all along MbUnit was better Testing private methods for .NET 2.0 rom Ben Hall. Database rollback support for .NET 2.0 from Cathal Connolly and Todd Menier. NUnit style explicit support from Graham Hey. Speaking of NUnit, they also have a new release, NUnit 2.4 Release Candidate (2.4.0). The Release Notes are here and include some nice features: A new syntax and internal architecture for Asserts is being introduced in this release, based on the notion of constraints found in JMock and NMock. The Assert.That method is used to make an assertion based on a constraint Assert.That( actual, constraint, message, args ); Assert.That( actual, constraint, message ); Assert.That( actual, constraint ); The constraint argument may be specified directly using one of the built-in constraint classes or a user-defined class. It may also be specified using one of the syntax helpers provided as static methods of the Is class, such as Is.Null Is.Empty Is.EqualTo( object ) Is.CollectionContaining( object ) Is.SubsetOf( collection ) SCSF is one of the most visible Microsoft projects being done in an Agile way. They are crazy as us doing one week Iterations. Blaine has some reflections on Iteration 3 . CB brother, Jeremy asks what OSS tools are you using in development? As I answered there, they include: NUnit CruiseControl.Net FitNesseDotNet RhinoMocks Subversion TortoiseSVN Ankh Wiki Speaking of tools. my good buddy Tomas (see you next week!) has a nice list of Text Editors One of the things Raymond and I discussed in Oklahoma was Read More...
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So after two days of downloading at broadband speeds, I finally got all the pieces of the Orcas Mrach CTP downloaded. Doublce-clicking on Part1.exe expanded the other 8 RAR files. Once that was done, I used Virtual PC 2007 on top of my Vista Ultimate desktop OS. I left the setting at 1 GB of RAM. I then attached to the VPC image and there I was staring at a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise login. The VPC image seems to be put together well. In addition to Orcas (Visual Studio 9), both SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 are present. A nice bonus is that TFS is fully installed saving a lot of work. So far, I have just created a Team Project in VSTS/TFS and the speeds are ok. I am going to be digging in during parts of the weekend, so I'll have more as I go along. Technorati Tags: .NET , .NET Framework 3 , Orcas , LINQ , OR/M , Windows Workflow , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , WF , Software Architecture , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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As fellow CodeBetter Blogger Richard notes, in his very gracious post , I will be giving two talks on WCF for INETA this coming Monday in Oklahoma City. The deck is being refined once again with my latest Indigo learnings especially as we deploy in Financial Banks. I also hope to have new demos, perhaps integrating with WF! Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , Apache Axis , Financial and Banking , WCF , WF , Windows Workflow , , Software Architecture , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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I don't really know what to call this post. I'm not as good as Palermo in doing 101 posts and I like to talk about the context so anyhow. Plus I'm not just a pretty link-blogger so away we go :). Way back in October, I talked about Re-Hosting the Windows Workflow Designer in our application . So the version that went out of our baseline Concentration product went without any workflow. I have been playing the Agile Architect the last few months scouting out the WF territory to see if we could accomplish our workflow architectural needs with WF. The short answer is Yes. If I had to summarize my months with WF is that WF is very powerful and capable. But a lot of that power comes from the fact that WF is such a general framework capable of being used in many different scenarios on Windows platform. There is no doubt that Microsoft providing such a powerful and flexible framework for developing workflows is so much better than having to develop our own framework, visual workflow designer, and runtime environment. But, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Because it is so general, you may have to do a lot of work to develop your domain-specific model and you will have to learn a lot about WF. You will still have to know about Workflow Architectures and deadlocks and all sorts of stuff. There are some in Redmond that seem to promote the view that you can just "drop" WF into your app and presto. One of the feedback items that us Architect MVPs gave the WF team last summit was this was dangerous. People have to be given guidance here. We have to leverage the decades of work that people like Eric Newcomer have already put into this field. People are using to transition UI pages for God's sake. In my original view of things, I thought I would re-host the WF Designer in our CAB Smart Client application giving Collateral Analysts a whole new power to design workflows. I thought, "wow, I can have analysts just drop Margin Calc and Collateral Demand activities Read More...
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In a post on January 25th , I said, "I posted yesterday that we had shipped our Enterprise Collateral Management solution based on our new architecture. As I said, we still have a lot more to do ." I provided a concise list of the methodologies, technologies and tools that we used in our 14 month cycle. To update where we are now, it will be necessary for me to give a little more context. First, when I mention "our company", we are actually a Division exclusively devoted to Collateral Management. This division, in turn is part of a much larger worldwide company that has at least 6 more financial sector products dealing with other aspects of managing risk. That company then, in turn is part of a huge Ratings company. The rest of the products are (mostly) integrated into one suite that we sell. Ours is not. One reason is that the various products have been organized into self-contained product groups. That means that we had our own development, marketing, sales, product and management for just Collateral Management. Five or six weeks ago, our company went through a rather large reorganization that aligned things by a global R&D, global Marketing, etc. I think this is an extremely good thing. Our product is now "owned" by R&D which also owns all the other products that are part of the suite and otherwise and we are detached from product so we can focus on development. We can also look at integrating into the suite and bi-directional learning. One consequence of this is now instead of my boss reporting to a VP of Collateral Management, he reports to a Senior Director in R&D who owns a product out of our large offices in Manhattan. The cool thing is that Josh Madden is a 20 year+ veteran developer/architect like me who has done great things in the Financial area for companies like Reuters. He gets development. The other cool thing is that his other product group also uses a lot of Agile techniques and greatly appreciates our total XP environment. One more thing: Read More...
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Data/ADO.NET Orcas Two from the ADO.NET team: Entity Client and Nulls - LINQ to DataSets Part 3 Software Architecture/SOA/CAB Udi answers, Can or should SOA be implemented without Web Services? David Chappell on The Three Faces of SOA Eric Newcomer: WS-* vs. REST is not the question Another architect with a chronicle of How CAN and TDD helps doing better designs WCF/CardSpace Richard Turner gives an insightful report on RSA2007 especially on the "demo showed Wachovia 's website running on Corillian 's online banking platform using Arcot Systems ' security engine to generate managed cards and process token requests." Corrillian and Wachovia's work will be important for all of this in this sector as more and more backs embrace CardSpace and Identity management. We are seeing a lot of movement in this area. Jorgen provides some great links on Interoperability with WCF . This is an area that I am becoming more involved with Java systems communicating with our WCF Services. Dr. Nick continues with More Poison Message Handling Tomas on Writing a WCF Transport Channel - Part 1 Agile Architecture Uncertain Planning Nick talks about The minimum amount of architecture needed for Test Driven Design . .NET Framework 3/WF .NET Framework 3.0 training kit for WF, WCF and CardSpace [via Mike ] .NET 3.0 Middleware Technologies Day: Third Incarnation David Chappell: Why Workflow Matters WF, WCF and CardSpace training materials posted Technorati Tags: .NET , Smart Client , PAG , CAB , Software Architecture , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , Windows Workflow , WF , Agile Architecture , TDD , .NET Framework 3 , ADO.NET , Orcas , Microsoft I'm listening to Street Life by Roxy Music on the album Stranded (Remastered) Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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