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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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Ever hear the story of the guy who responded to ScottW's Facebook NJ Developers and DonXML 's same email and gets addicted to Facebook ? CLR/Rotor Phil Haack has a most excellent tip on an easier way to see the Rotor code. Instead of doing the whole multi-hour Rotor unzipping and building dance, you can view most of the code online here ! Design Patterns/UI/CAB/Software Design/Agile Jeremy continues his brilliant series with his Build Your Own CAB #14 . I'm not going to quote the whole title as it has too many buzzwords to type :) Speaking of buzzwords, Chris combines a mouthfull in his most excellent post: NUnit, NBehave, DSLs, Fluent Interfaces - and other popular gibber jabber. You should read it. Windsor/IoC Jeremy Jarrell has started an excellent series on tools that we Agile developers use. The first piece is an excellent down-to-earth tutorial on Windsor, the Inversion of Control (IoC) container piece of the Castle Project , the same guys that bring you MonoRail IronRuby Scott Hanselman continues the Iron Ruby juice with a WPF Sample in IronRuby talking via C# to Wesabe WCF/Distributed .NET Matevz Gacnik has an interesting post where he managed to get distributed transaction scenario working using WCF , MTOM and WS-AtomicTransactions . [tags: CLR, C#, Rotor, WPF, LINQ, DLR, IronRuby, Castle, Windsorm MTOM, Distributed Transactions, Design Patterns, CAB, UI Design] Read More...
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Multithreading and Concurrency Software Transactional Memory Part IV - Thread-Bound Transactions Software Transactional Memory Part V - Integration with System.Transactions Parallel LINQ Restating the Concurrency Problem Herb Sutter is starting a new column on Effective Concurrency Shared nothing parallel programming \ Software Design/Smart Clients/CAB/Web Clients Using NUnitAsp to test Pages w/Forms Authentication Build your own CAB #12 - Rein in runaway events with the "Latch" Build your own CAB #13 - Embedded Controllers with a Dash of DSL A whole pile of goodness taking CAB forward from the folks at SCSFContrib . which includes A full implementation of the UI layer for CAB done in WPF with 100% code coverage in tests!! (see Bill's post ) WCF/SOA ChannelFactory Behaviors David Chappell declares the REST vs. WS-* War over . Here's hoping Orcas/LINQ ScottGu continues his excellent series with LINQ to SQL (Part 4 - Updating Our Database) ADO.NET Entity Framework The ADO.NET Entity Framework June 2007 CTP is now available. See the team blog for changes Ruby/Subversion My team-mate Steve points to some great resources on the Beauty of Ruby as well as finding a Web-based Subversion Browser Other Link Blogs Interesting Finds: July 10, 2007 PM Edition Daily Grind 1182 Technorati Tags: CAB , Ruby , Concurrency , Microsoft .NET , Software Transactional Memory , PLINQ , NUnitASP , Software Design , Design Patterns , Ruby on Rails , Subversion Read More...
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TGIF!! I am super busy right now designing a multi-CPU/multi-threaded Parallel Calculation Engine and diving into the science of Parallel Computing. I'll have some links when I get a chance. Windows Workflow Tomas talks about Silver , the integration of WF + WCF. The marriage is sorely needed because, as I have posted here , the current situation well, sucks. Silver uses Queues and bypasses EDS completely, which is what anyone needs to do to have any real success of communication into Workflows. Because we could not use Orcas here, we actually implemented our own version of the mechanism to avoid the hell that is EDS. Jon Flanders , the guy that helped me with the above, also worked on the PageFlow Sample that has been updated to V1.1 Even more interesting is that he has working on this project for hosting Workflows inside of BizTalk. This is very interesting as developing your own host is so not trivial, but I totally challenge Paul's assertion that " No BizTalk Experience Required ." Architecture Steve Jones has a post YAGNI, Requirements and why scaling isn't always important that I totally agree with and is in-line with what I try to do as an " Agile Architect ": "Split information exchange from the business services, and worry about the scaling that is appropriate for your information exchange. Don't worry about technical purity and some "wonder" architectural approach. Don't over engineer because if you do X (or R) then it will scale to 100,000 users, but your requirements say "6". Software Design/Agile/XP/Design Patterns/CAB Number 11 for Jeremy in his continuing excellent series on UI Design Patterns in Build your own CAB #11 - Event Aggregator Jeremy has another big AMEN post for me in his Design for Testability , which really goes with my Writing Maintainable Code post, "" Done, done, done " isn't just writing code. It's writing code and verifying that that code works correctly. Read More...
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Slim pickings today. CLR/.NET Scott Hanselman provides advice on how to partition your app and figuring out the right number of assemblies/libraries WCF/BizTalk Services/WCF Dennis points out that he and John Shewchuk recorded a channel9 video that describes the why and what of BizTalk Services. Its now online here: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=317646 Durable Instance Context sample (via Harry ) Windows Vista Running a dual-monitor setup with Windows Vista Resharper/Software Development Tools Took goodness Jeff Palermo found a hack to make Ctrl-N type discovery work properly (speed up!) in Resharper. Ctrl-N I am finding, is one of the keys to success with Resharper. Technorati Tags: CLR , Microsoft , Microsoft .NET , New and Notable , WCF , Windows Communication Foundation , BizTalk Services , Resharper , Windows Vista Read More...
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Acropolis David Hill's blog is here and the Team Blog is here One nice post on the Team Blog is Extending the Notepad Sample with a Web Browser View Secret Themes in Acropolis Three New Acropolis Videos WCF/SOA/WF/Orcas Jesus Rodriguez on Orcas Durable Services Speaking of WCF, Steve details a really strange finding for both of us: that one way Indigo messages can block. I got the Indigo tracing turned on and it confirmed the results: closing the client proxy blocks until the one way message completes. Why? This seems to defeat the purpose of One Way Messages Harry rounds up the REST responses MAC OS/X OK, so two of my good friends dump Parallels for latest beta of VMWare Fusion . Time to look this weekend! Entity Framework Somehow, I forgot to blog Jeff's post about the good news: Entity Framework to Get Persistence Ignorance (PI) Blogging Good advice from Mr Hanselman on keeping your blog from sucking especially since I have violated some of the principles :) Silverlight/ASP.NET/Expression/Win2K8 Server Brad Abrams covers all of the above in one post Technorati Tags: Orcas. WCF , Durable Messaging , REST , MAC OS/X , Entity Framework , Blogging , Silverlight , ASP.NET , Acropolis , CAB Read More...
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Its suddenly over 80 degrees here today and went off for a drenching run. Team System/Team Foundation Server Big news of the day is that Microsoft has acquired TeamPlain , which makes the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team Server. Brian Harry says, "Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server and can be downloaded from here . It will be accessible by any user properly licensed with a TFS CAL." This is great news as this is the #1 question I always get from people whenever I bring up TFS. I don't know if its a news item but together with one of my IT guys I started standing up a TFS server yesterday. Before everyone panics, my motivation is pure experimentation at this part and I wouldn't use all of it anyhow (I would never leave NUnit and CruiseControl.NET) but I am interested in replacing an internal system + Wiki + other stuff into Work Item Tracking and maybe the source control. I am starting to get sick of Subversion but its seems to be doing right by the team. Speaking of TFS, Microsoft has let loose the plans for Rosario , the next version of TFS that is just past Orcas. Speaking of future plans, the same page has all the plans for the next year for VSTS. Geez, isn't anything secret anymore? :) WCF/Indigo/SOA Michele has been real busy! I know she's at DevConnections this week, the book is close to done (and its going to rock!) and last week she was at SD West 2007 and put up a slew of materials from it including great stuff on Contracts & Versioning, CardSpace and Identity. INETA Speaker Matevz Gacnik delivered an INETA talk on WCF session support, one of the bedrock's of our Service Interface Layer. He has the PPT Code I'm rocking out to Begin The Begin by R.E.M. from the album And I Feel Fine...The Best Of The IRS Years 82-87 Technorati Tags: .NET , Team Foundation Server , VSTS , Visual Studio Team System , Orcas , WCF , Windows Communication Foundation , Indigo , .NET Framework 3 , Microsoft 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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As my good friend Tomas notes , the Connected Systems Division (the people that did WSE, Indigo, Workflow and much more) are doing some pretty interesting "Cloud" services. At the moment these are experimental services you can play with but they don't yet have any SLAs or assurances. If that turns out to be the case, it will be a huge step forward and I would jump on it on my project. What do they have? They have an STS: Security Token Service that is an open identity provider that integrates with CardSpace to provide an authentication service. Having implemented a bare bones STS, I know this is not easy work and mine is far from complete. I need to use SAML, WS-Federation, CardSpace/OpenId to integrate with Java platforms and existing authentication providers. This is a HUGE win for us if we don't have to build it and IF Microsoft hosts it with the appopriate SLAs. Next up is the Relay Service which lets you expose a WCF based endpoint/service to the Internet from behind a firewall or NAT. Having worked with two companies in my past, Groove and Adesso, that had Relay Services and groked this area, I am real excited. The Relay Service uses whatever security policies you have and had defined with the STS so its secure. One scenario that is key for us is that we wanted to offer a "Direct" Service to two banks that want to collobrate with each other. We looked at doing that with with Dual Bindings in WCF but of course banks don't want to punch another hole in their firewall so this could be a great solution. Have a look! All this stuff works with the .NET Framework 3.0 and WCF. Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , Software Architecture , .NET Framework 3 , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! 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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