WCF Team Bloggers

Reader Trends

2008-07-25T12:00:00Z

A few of the more noticeable changes in this week's site design might prompt some questions as to how the Web audience is evolving over time. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the actual numbers that back up reader's requests and complaints by comparing a snapshot from this week with a snapshot from one year ago. In each time period I pulled out a sample of 10000 visitors. The 75% of you that read this through RSS can go back to wondering why anyone still uses a web browser. Why...(read more)

Trusting IP Addresses

2008-07-24T12:00:00Z

How do I find the address of a client connection to make a trust decision? Don't base security decisions on the perceived client address. Any address that we have comes from the underlying socket implementation and could be spoofed. The data that the socket has is sourced by the client. You should be using a source of information that has a verification process that the server trusts, such as a certificate, to distinguish clients. Next time: Reader Trends Read More......(read more)

Help with Security Programming

2008-07-23T12:00:00Z

Security programming today tends to contain large amount of plumbing code to handle the modeling, management, and evaluation of identities. An identity is the basis of many common security operations, such as authentication, personalization, authorization, and access control. There are a variety of different kinds of identities and ways of implementing security operations on top of those identities. Here are two libraries that help make dealing with identities easier. Zermatt is a claims-based identity...(read more)

Standards Guide

2008-07-22T12:00:00Z

Looking for a guide to all of the web services protocols implemented by WCF? There's no single document that captures all of the information, but there is a group of documents that talk about the implemented protocols and some of the choices in those implementations. The level of detail varies from document to document as a few are high-level summaries across areas of the product while others are low-level details of a particular protocol. Web Services Protocols Interoperability Guide Web Services...(read more)

Annual Site Redesign

2008-07-21T12:00:00Z

I don't actually promise to update the design every year but it makes it sound more exciting- as if there's some kind of recurring event that people might look forward to. This year's design focused on improving content readability. I removed some of the design elements and dead space to get enough room to expand the text size and content area. In the process I lost the indigo-themed color scheme although I hope to bring it back some day. Having both light and dark backgrounds in the main part of...(read more)

Why Photographers Hate Creative Commons

2008-07-19T19:22:49Z

http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/archives/2008/07/000500.html Read More......(read more)

Finding a Client Channel

2008-07-18T12:00:00Z

Where can I get the IContextChannel that OperationContextScope requires? OperationContextScope allows you to create a temporary scope in which context for a service operation can build up before and after the operation is actually called. The constructor for OperationContextScope takes an instance of IContextChannel, which is a type that you've probably never seen before. Why are you expected to have this unknown type? It's because you have instances of it floating around all the time even though...(read more)

XQuery 1.1 Draft

2008-07-17T12:00:00Z

A working draft for a 1.1 revision to XQuery went up earlier this week. The changes from XQuery 1.0 (which was finished just last year) to XQuery 1.1 appear to be small. There are two additional operators for grouping and windowing over a data stream. The group operator is fairly standard while the window operator is a bit more unusual. Applying a window controls what it means to draw a sequence of consecutive items from the stream. You can get the complete specification from the W3C site. XQuery...(read more)

Conversation with the C# Team

2008-07-16T12:00:00Z

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)

Announcing the Microsoft Code-Name "BizTalk Services" R12 Release

2008-07-15T15:30:37Z

We’re thrilled to announce that the BizTalk Services “R12” Community Technology Preview (CTP) is now available for general use. “BizTalk Services” is the code-name for a platform-in-the-cloud offering from Microsoft. Currently in active development, BizTalk Services provides Messaging, Workflow, and Identity functionality to enable disparate applications to connect quickly and easily. Combined together in an integrated offering, these capabilities deliver a Service Bus architectural pattern that...(read more)

Hosting Queued Services in IIS

2008-07-15T12:00:00Z

Over the past few days Tom Hollander has been posting his experiences hosting a queue-based WCF service in IIS. These posts go into a lot of detail about setting up the machines, configuring the service, and troubleshooting problems. If you're looking for a step-by-step guide, this is a great resource. MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 1) MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 2) MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 3) Read More......(read more)

BizTalk Services R11/R12 upgrade in progress

2008-07-15T11:32:18Z

The BizTalk Services CTP will be switched from the "R11" to the "R12" release starting in about 30 minutes and we expect to have a 2 hour time window (1400h-1600h PT/2300h-0100h UTC) where existing service accounts are being rolled over to the new release. We're expecting to be done with the migration by 1600h. Once the migration is done we'll give you an update on what's new in R12. Read More......(read more)

Architect Insight Conference Talks

2008-07-14T12:00:00Z

Slide decks are available from the Architect Insight Conference 2008 held in the UK at the end of April. These talks are fluffier than ones that I normally point to and since you only have the slides and not the audio, I recommend picking a few based on their titles and trying them out quickly to see if you find something interesting. Here are two that I thought looked interesting. Building an Enterprise Service Bus with BizTalk Server 2006 & WCF Standardising SOA You can access all of the content...(read more)

BizTalk Services: Update to the services (and SDK) scheduled

2008-07-12T11:02:35Z

Heads up: If things go as planned, the BizTalk Services cloud will be unavailable for a few hours during the day on Tuesday 7/15 (U.S. Pacific Time) since we're doing an update to the services and to the SDK. I will post an update with the exact time window some time on Monday. Once we're back up and have verified that everything is working as intended we'll let you know about it and tell you what's new. Applications built on the R11 release (the release currently running in the data center) will...(read more)

Zermatt: Claims-based identity for ASP.NET (and more!)

2008-07-11T17:41:08Z

Congrats to all my friends working in the Identity space on the relase of first beta of the Zermatt SDK . Other folks have written some great posts that provide the background and motivation for Zermatt better than I ever will, and there are some links you should check out at the bottom of this post. Suffice it to say that Zermatt is about making the power of the claims-based identity protocols we shipped in WCF V1 programmable and usable by normal humans. Zermatt has a few things that I think are...(read more)