WCF is very cool, but configuring WCF can virtually derail a project. Even relatively simple-seeming configurations can take hours or days to get working. It is frustrating! And the most complex part is getting security working. The Microsoft Patterns and Practices group recently released beta guidance for WCF security , and it is probably the single best resource for information about configuring WCF security you'll find anywhere.

Here is my usual post-conference post with updated code samples related to the topics I presented on. I did 2 full day tutorials, and 4 sessions...enjoy! Many of the demos come from my book, Learning WCF. Since there is setup required for most of the samples that illustrate security or rely on a database, it is best you download the entire package of samples and follow the setup instructions provided in the appendix. Here's the link: http://www.thatindigogirl.com/LearningWCFCode.aspx TUTORIAL: Improve

A few weeks ago I was presenting a code sample that I created last year and discovered a mysterious problem. First, let me explain the sample. It is a proxy wrapper for WCF clients that illustrates how to swallow timeout exceptions and recreate channels automatically when there is an exception that faults the channel. The idea is this: When a channel with a transport session times out, does the user need to see an error? Not really. But, the exception won't show up until you try to call the service,

P&P is putting together guidance for WCF security and is looking for feedback from the community. Now is the time to influence the results from your own practical experience so get in there and review the whole thing or the areas of your greatest interest over the next few weeks! The feedback will be really useful! J.D. Meier's blog has a link here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2008/03/27/patterns-and-practices-wcf-security-guidance-now-available.aspx Or, go direct to the CodePlex site:

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

A little while ago I ran into an interesting set of errors that may be of interest to you. Consider the following service contract snippet: [OperationContract] [WebGet(UriTemplate= "foobar/{value}" )] String GetData(String value ); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd

My friend Vittorio has posted that MySpace will be talking about WCF at Mix 2008 ( see it here ). This promises to be a good session!

I thought it might be mildly interesting to document the lifecycle of a demo. Over the next week or so I have to design, build, and deploy a demo that shows off some of the web-centric features of WCF in the .NET Framework 3.5. First, let me state the constraints: 1) it has to be lightweight - a person in the field or in the community must be able to run it with a bare bones setup (VS only) 2) it has to be "codable" from the ground up in a short period of time w/o much practice 3) it has to show

Previous posts have talked a bit about PictureServices. Now I'd like to run through what it took to bring PictureServices to the BizTalk Services. I've talked a bit in other posts about BizTalk Services, but it has some interesting and very useful messaging features. For starters, BizTalk Services has an endpoint that can do HTTP transforms on messages. It goes like this: MyApp connects to BizTalk Services BizTalk Services and MyApp use WS-* security, coupled with the WCF binary message encoding.

Following on the heels of Steve Maine's post about namespaces in Syndication objects (Feeds, items, etc.), I thought it wise to plug the new stuff in PictureServices . At the moment, PictureServices implements SLE (Simple List Extensions), and does a pretty crude job of it at that. Time permitting, I will add more support for field and group customization. For now, it serves as an example more than a carrier grade implementation. In any event, I used extension methods in the following type definition