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Channel 9 posted a video a few days ago with the C# 4.0 design team talking about some of their motivations and ideas for language design. I tend to enjoy the videos like this one that are focused on the people a lot more than the ones that are focused on the outputs of technology. It's hard to stay awake while watching someone write code on a board even when played at double speed. There's no problem keeping attention here even though they barely talk about what's changing with the language itself. Read More...
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There's more than one way to work with workflow, which is why Windows Workflow Foundation and BizTalk Server are both tools for programming workflow applications. If you've ever wondered why there are two workflow products and which one to use, then read Kent Brown's article on choosing the right workflow tool to clear up your confusion. Or, don't read the article and remain confused. It's up to you. Read More...
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I rarely need to set up machines often enough to remember the setup instructions and finding the documentation for setup sadly never seems to help. Lately I've been referring to the appendix on setup in Michele Bustamante's Learning WCF book when I need to install SQL, configure IIS, or work with certificates. Michele's setup instructions were only supposed to cover the samples in the book but I've found them to be better than the other resources that I've got on hand. Next time: Finding the Service Instance Read More...
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This week I got to spend two days with the BizTalk and Connected System MVPs as part of the 2008 MVP Summit . I want to thank everyone who came out to join us during the week. We had a great series of talks put together about some of the things that we aren't publicly talking about yet. For those of you that don't know who our MVPs are, you can read their profiles at the Microsoft MVP Awardees site. Read More...
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The year in review comes at the end of December rather than the beginning of January this year. Another year has gone by, with 250 articles posted so far (exactly as many as were posted during all of last year). Counting today and four more to come by the end of the year, the total for the year will be 255 articles and a grand total of 505 articles overall. 397 of those articles are directly about WCF. Due to holidays there will be no posts on Monday December 24th, Tuesday December 25th, or Tuesday January 1st. The top articles of all time are listed in the sidebar but here are the most read articles of 2007 and the most read articles written in 2007. Most Read Articles During 2007 Configuring HTTP for Windows Vista Inside the Standard Bindings: NetTcp Net.Tcp Port Sharing Sample, Part 1 Inside the Standard Bindings: BasicHttp How to: Enabling Streaming Preventing Anonymous Access Net.Tcp Port Sharing Sample, Part 2 Making Sense of Transport Quotas MSMQ and Poison Messages Configuring HTTP Most Read Articles Written in 2007 Preventing Anonymous Access MSMQ and Poison Messages Designing New Faults Orcas Beta 1 Released Client IP Address Enabling Kerberos in IIS Using XML Serialization with WCF WCF Case Studies A Trick with Faults (Discussion) Getting the Client Identity The feedback that the article on client IP addresses got directly contributed to that feature being added in Orcas. You have to speak up if you want things to change. Read More...
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Earlier this week the W3C HTML working group published a list of design principles for working on HTML 5 . HTML isn't strictly relevant for a web services programmer but I figured that there was sufficient overlap that many people would find this work interesting. Here's the list of principles, although you'll have to follow the earlier link if you want additional descriptions. Support Existing Content Degrade Gracefully Do not Reinvent the Wheel Pave the Cowpaths Evolution Not Revolution Solve Real Problems Priority of Constituencies Secure By Design Separation of Concerns DOM Consistency Well-defined Behavior Avoid Needless Complexity Handle Errors Media Independence Support World Languages Accessibility Although not the intention, most of these principles turn out to apply equally well for the world of web services. DOM Consistency, Media Independence, and Accessibility don't map so well because most services take the separation between content and presentation to a logical extreme and essentially only deal with content. It's not that these problems don't exist in applications anymore but that the cause and solution have been punted to other parts of the system. Paving the Cowpaths comes up less frequently because usage errors tend to be scrutinized and rejected rather than tolerated, preventing alternative, illegal formulations from becoming widespread. Read More...
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One of the least pleasant chores of getting Orcas everywhere has been cleaning out the old versions of software. If you've just been trying out the framework in the past, then it's not too bad. I've been using Visual Studio 2008 betas everywhere in addition to the framework. All three of the machines I've upgraded so far have needed some manual intervention. Visual Studio has dozens of components that are part of the typical install. After uninstalling a beta, some of the individual component uninstallers might not have finished successfully. That can usually be fixed by removing those components explicitly. This list gives the order components should be removed if any of them are left around. I haven't needed anything more drastic yet then running the individual uninstallers. Read More...
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What does the term ESB- Enterprise Service Bus- actually mean? That question has been the topic of an ongoing debate for several years now that doesn't seem to have any sign of stopping. When I first read about ESBs in 2003, I didn't expect to still be trying to understand them more than four years later. In comparison, there have been other technologies that in the same time frame were introduced, developed, matured, and obsolete. However, it has felt like the definitions are getting closer in spirit if not words. Here is a current selection that I could find (using search to find the pages that were most referenced but possibly not most recent). BEA defines the ESB : At the highest level, an ESB provides common communication and integration services for composite applications and shared services in an SOA. IBM defines the ESB : An enterprise service bus (ESB) is a pattern of middleware that unifies and connects services, applications and resources within a business. Oracle defines the ESB : It provides a much-needed intermediary layer that facilitates data delivery, service access, service reuse, and service management of an enterprise SOA implementation. Sonic defines the ESB : An ESB is software infrastructure that simplifies the integration and flexible reuse of business components within a service-oriented architecture. Tibco defines the ESB : An enterprise service bus (ESB) is a standards-based communication layer in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that enables services to be used across multiple communication protocols. Microsoft has a site that is being put together to provide ESB guidance but dodges the question of definition (the site plays up the ESB means different things to different people angle). At the end of the day though, the clearest definition of what companies think ESB means comes from looking at the products that they build. Read More...
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Minor technical hangup Wednesday when the normal post ended up not appearing in the RSS feed. I fixed it a few hours later, but if you're still missing Revealing the Hierarchy , then you can get it through the web link. Trackbacks and comments for the post disappeared in the process. Sorry. The repair work also ended up knocking the Thursday post out of the queue unintentionally. Everything should be back to normal tomorrow. Read More...
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Continuing the series of milestones, Monday marked the 400th post. With the small number of days having multiple posts and the very small number of days having no posts, that has as expected worked out extremely near to exactly one post per weekday for 18 months. Amazingly, 306 of those posts have managed to be about WCF. When I first started, I expected to get no more than a few dozen posts before having to switch to other topics. That will not be necessary any time soon. The next milestone to be celebrated will be after 800 posts, so you can expect this to occur on approximately March 9th, 2009. Here are the milestone dates so far: 1st post- February 6th, 2006 101st post- June 13, 2006 201st post- October 24, 2006 401st post- July 31st, 2007 Read More...
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I'm thinking about including lists like these in the sidebar, but I wanted to try this out once first. Subscriptions mean that the number of RSS readers is more or less the same for articles posted around the same time. Therefore, I'm defining top content in terms of how popular an article is to be the number of times clicked through by web users. Of course, this biases things quite a bit towards articles that have interesting content that people want to visit multiple times. Top Content- Last 30 Days Michele's Webcasts Start Monday WCF Case Studies Orcas Beta 1 Released Inside the Standard Bindings: NetTcp Configuring HTTP for Windows Vista Changing the ChannelFactory Contract Net.Tcp Port Sharing Sample, Part 1 Top Content- Last 6 Months Configuring HTTP for Windows Vista MSMQ and Poison Messages Net.Tcp Port Sharing Sample, Part 1 Inside the Standard Bindings: NetTcp Inside the Standard Bindings: BasicHttp Net.Tcp Port Sharing Sample, Part 2 Preventing Anonymous Access Read More...
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It's felt like there have been a lot of articles based on answering reader questions lately. And, when I checked the totals, I noticed that the next Answers column would be the 100th. Since I started running answers to questions a little less than a year ago, then assuming around 240 posts per year, that means that a bit less than half of all articles over the course of a year have been about answering questions. I started running answers to questions based on reader feedback so it would be interesting to know whether people still like the idea. Would you rather: Have more answers to questions and fewer original articles? Have more original articles and fewer answers to questions? Have equal amounts of both? Read More...
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I get quite a few messages through the email contact form- usually at least a dozen per week that ask questions about WCF. For the past year, I've been able to reply to nearly all of these with a wait of no more than about 1-2 weeks. By the way, if you have a question that you'd like to get answered sooner, then you can frequently have responses within hours when posting to the WCF forums . When you use the contact form though, you need to give a valid email address if you'd like me to respond. If you leave it blank or put the wrong address in, I have no way to contact you. Many questions eventually get posted as articles but that generally happens months after I've received the question. Read More...
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This year I've added a dozen additional categories to cover the topics that I was writing about most frequently but didn't have any specific label for. You can read about the older categories in the original glossary . Some of these categories go with article series that haven't been published yet. I don't intend to go back through the entire history to update articles with the new categories. I will update articles as I see them though. Addressing- Articles about WS-Addressing and other ways of referring to endpoints. Behaviors- Articles about the behavior model of WCF services. Channel Dev Tour- Series of articles on building and using channels. Contracts- Articles about service and operation contracts. Faults- Articles about the SOAP model for faults and error handling. Message Security- Articles about SOAP-level security protocols. Proxies- Articles about the proxy objects generated for talking with services. Queues- Articles about MSMQ and other queuing systems. Quotas- Articles about the throttles and limits that bound service operations. Reliable Messaging- Articles about WS-ReliableMessaging and other reliable delivery guarantees. Serialization- Articles about the conversion between strongly-typed objects and messages. Service Model- Articles about one of the WCF service-level topics. Next time: ChannelFactory Contract and Generated Types Read More...
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Microsoft runs intern programs all the time, but there's a particularly large wave that comes for summer college internships. This is the wave that has tons of weekly events, product fairs, and a summer-end party at Bill's house. After watching this year's candidates trickle through for their interviews in the spring, the last few weeks have had a noticeable rush of those that accepted offers. I don't know how many interns there are in total, although I've read that it's somewhere around a thousand in the area. Nevertheless, the number is quite small compared to the size of the regular employee workforce. For some reason though, it is possible to spot the intern if you have a careful eye. This is because They are frequently in the vicinity of the intern staples beer and pizza, a fact which attracts many non-intern visitors to their events Although Microsoft employees receive enough free shirts to rarely need laundry services, only the interns are brave enough to wear them The urge to go to the grocery store and get an entire cart of nothing but microwaveable dinners and koolaid packets fades quickly after graduation Read More...
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