I gave a chalk talk on channel development in the afternoon yesterday. I did a huge experiment for the second-half of the talk, which was to write a custom channel from scratch for the audience. That's the kind of theater that you can pull off in a chalk talk but not a regular breakout session. I started with a completely empty Visual Studio environment, wrote a web service, explained why the web service call crashed due to a protocol issue, and then fixed the crash by writing a custom channel. We had 46 people in the audience at the start. The capacity of the chalk talk theaters is only 32 people, but we secured about a dozen extra chairs from the lounges and people stood along the back. Capacity was an issue for several of the chalk talks yesterday. I saw one chalk talk for BizTalk that had crammed almost 60 people into the room. If you're in the audience, it starts getting quite warm after a while. The breakout session rooms are quite spacious on the other hand so I haven't seen any problems there. The Orlando venue has a tremendous capacity and a generally good layout. The only other difficulty was that the standard equipment was a non-adjustable over-ear headset microphone. In addition to making you look like a cross between a call-center worker and a pop star, that type of mic is pretty uncomfortable to wear for an hour and picks up a lot of extra noise if you move around while talking. I tried a half-dozen ways of putting the headset on to fix the issues before the AV guy offered a standard lapel microphone. They had one sitting in the AV case in the room. I don't know why they didn't make the proper equipment available from the start. I promised at the end of the talk that I'd post some resources. Ed Pinto and Kenny Wolf are giving a talk "Architecture of Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation and Common Extensibility Points" on Thursday at 4:30 PM. Steve Maine is giving the buzzword titled talk "Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation Syndication, AJAX and REST Services in Web 2.0 with .NET Framework 3.5" on Friday at 1 PM. There are six samples that I particularly recommend for channel developers. Chunking channel HttpCookieSession channel UDP transport WSE transport UDP activation Config code generator Finally, here is the code that was written during the talk. The scenario was based on an HTTP problem I described back in August . using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Channels;
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