Nicholas Allen's Indigo Blog

Channel 9 has two new videos of Scott Guthrie demonstrating features in the upcoming releases of Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2. These two long videos are from a recent session in the Netherlands and basically provide a half-day overview and demonstration...

Now that I've covered the essentials of the binary format, those interested might want to try their hand at translating an encoded message. This message uses many of the constructs you've seen plus a few more I'll outline here. The record type 0x0B...

Past parts in the series: Binary Encoding, Part 1 Binary Encoding, Part 2 Binary Encoding, Part 3 Binary Encoding, Part 4 Binary Encoding, Part 5 We looked last time at some of the patterns used in the binary format for reducing the...

Tomasz Janczuk has posted another example using the HTTP polling duplex channel in Silverlight to build pub-sub style applications. This sample addresses the use of polling in a scaled-out configuration . The solution employed is to move the server...

We've got a new article up on MSDN by Aaron Skonnard that covers the most recent preview release of the WCF REST Starter Kit. The download for REST expands on the capabilities we added in Orcas for building web services with REST protocols with features...

Past parts in the series: Binary Encoding, Part 1 Binary Encoding, Part 2 Binary Encoding, Part 3 Binary Encoding, Part 4 The problem we saw last time was that a structural reduction for message fragments...

Past parts in the series: Binary Encoding, Part 1 Binary Encoding, Part 2 Binary Encoding, Part 3 Now that you’ve gotten an introduction to the principles and capabilities of the binary encoding format, let’s jump...

Another CTP release is coming for the .Net Services cloud offering in October and again there are some changes to their existing web service offerings. The team is changing their focus from primarily SOAP-based services to REST-based services and simplifying...

The fourth part of the binary encoding series was scheduled to go up Friday but went missing at some point early in the day. I’m going to track down what happened and you should see the series continue Tuesday.

Past parts in the series: Binary Encoding, Part 1 Binary Encoding, Part 2 Today I’ll talk about the XML features that are and aren’t supported by the binary encoding format we use in WCF. Since the binary format was designed for a specific...

The fifth preview of the new ASP.NET AJAX features for future versions of the framework is now available. The AJAX release consists of server-side controls and programming model for building ASP.NET applications that offer functionality through AJAX requests...

The binary format we developed is based on a tokenized stream of records and a few Huffman-like coding strategies. Each record starts with a one byte record type value. The record type byte is then followed by binary content of variable format and size...

The Windows Management Framework has put out a release candidate porting some of the management features in Windows 7 to versions of Windows from Windows XP to Server 2008. The management framework includes PowerShell 2.0 and the Windows implementation...

This series on the .Net Binary Encoding protocol is going to be similar to the earlier series I did on .Net Message Framing . The two are also somewhat related as they’re used together frequently and the messaging framing protocol has direct knowledge...

Over on Channel 9 George Moore has a video talking about the commercialization and billing aspects of Azure cloud services that is aimed at developers. In particular, the video covers the background and basics of all the things that developers don’t need...

If you’ve tried using the HttpListener API to build a web server, then you may have noticed that many runtime errors come back as wrapped Win32 errors rather than different exception types. Since HttpListener doesn’t say what specific Win32 errors might...

Here are the past articles in the series to get up to date: Some History of the Named Pipe, Part 1 (Unix pipes) Some History of the Named Pipe, Part 2 (Unix fifo) Some History of the Named Pipe, Part 3 (Windows named pipe) The last part...

Today is a US national holiday, which generally means I don’t put up a post due to the drastically reduced number of readers. Here’s a look ahead at some of the topics coming this week though: Final part of the series on named pipes My notes on...

We’ve got a new round of talks uploaded to the PDC site if you’ll be attending the conference. Ed Pinto is signed up to do a talk on the new features in WCF 4, including the topics of discovery and routing that were asked about in response to my PDC...

Silverlight 3 has been updated with a small set of bug fixes and support for the GB18030 code page for developing Chinese localized applications. A GDR, unlike a hotfix update that you might get from product support, is intended for general use but is...

The other day I noticed Brad Abrams plugging the book Silverlight 3 Jumpstart (I’ve only flipped through it so I don’t have a personal recommendation on whether new Silverlight developers should get it). The thing that struck me about the Jumpstart book...

In the .Net framework there are a number of notions of versioning that we worry about for a release. Some of the traditional notions of versioning are backwards compatibility (the ability for your old programs and data to continue working in the same...