The June edition of VSLive 2009 is next month June 8th through 10th in Las Vegas. If you're interested in attending to hear about WCF, there's a dedicated track on the first day as well as some related sessions on the third day.

VM3 Understanding Transactions in WCF by Michiel van Otegem

Transactions play an important role in keeping our systems in a consistent state, making sure that combined operations all succeed or all fail. When working with (web) services, transactions are more complex than within a single AppDomain. Fortunately we have transactions support in WCF to help us manage this complexity. This session looks at how transactions work in WCF, the different transaction managers used by WCF in different scenarios, and of course how to use transactions in WCF.

VM6 WCF Extensibility In-Depth by Jesus Rodriguez

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides a rich messaging framework that extends beyond its capabilities for modeling and implementing services. One of the aspects where WCF really shines when compared with competitive Web services stacks is its rich extensibility model that allows developers to customize the default behavior of the framework. The better we understand the WCF extensibility model the better chance we have to make the right use of WCF in real-world applications.

In this session, we dive deeply into the WCF extensibility model, detailing the different extensibility points of WCF subsystems such as Channels, Hosting, Security, Metadata, Encoding, and others. Specifically, we provide practical demonstrations of how custom channels, behaviors, operation invokers, authorization managers, and metadata extensions can be used to extend WCF effectively without affecting the consistency of the programming model. We also highlight a set of best practices developers should consider to address their specific scenarios properly when extending WCF.

VM9 Advanced Access Control with WCF by Michiel van Otegem

WCF has many security features, some tied to the Windows platform, others to the WS-* standards for SOAP. Just the authentication and authorization features offer quite a few possibilities. Most of these are identity based, but the new world order is claims-based access. This session looks at the various ways in which you can authenticate and authorize with standard WCF and also looks at the "Geneva" Claims Based Access Platform for WCF.

VM12 WCF-WF Integration In-Depth with an Eye Towards Dublin by Jesus Rodriguez

The combination of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) provides the building block for the next generation of Microsoft .NET applications. With the release of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 and the upcoming 4.0, developers now have multiple alternatives to build applications that combine WCF and WF. In this session, we illustrate some of the most common scenarios for integrating WCF and WF, and we explore mechanisms such as Durable Services, Workflow Services, rules-based authorization, line-of-business workflows, and other mechanisms that are best implemented by combining WCF and WF. We also share a series of best practices and techniques that developers can follow in order to implement a seamless integration between WCF and WF. Additionally, we explore how the Dublin Application Server provides a better ecosystem for WCF-WF integrated solutions.

VM15 Windows Workflow and WCF Help Make “Software + Services” a Reality by Michael Stiefel

The future of software is a combination of local software and Internet services interacting with one another. Software should run in locations that have the maximum compute power while minimizing the amount of data that has to be transferred. Sometimes mission critical software has to run even when disconnected to the Internet. When reconnected, the various data sources have to be reconciled. By bringing together the worlds of rich clients and services in the cloud, you can get the best of both worlds.

Two critical technologies for putting together these two worlds are Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). WCF makes it possible for the different worlds to talk to each other. WF makes it possible for applications to run when and where it is appropriate, and to easily wait for data to arrive.

.NET Framework 3.5 has begun the integration of these two technologies which is more developed in .NET Framework 4.0. This gateway to the world of Software + Services and cloud computing is what we will explore.

VW4 Codename "Dublin": Windows Application Server by Aaron Skonnard

Microsoft recently announced a set of enhanced Windows Server capabilities codenamed "Dublin" that offer greater scalability and easier manageability around WCF/WF applications. "Dublin" extends IIS/WAS to provide a standard host environment for applications that use these core .NET technologies to simplify the deployment, configuration, management, and scalability of composite applications, while allowing developers to use their existing skills with Visual Studio, .NET, and IIS. This session introduces you to the new world of "Dublin".