Another year's worth of stats from the world around us. Due to the way the calendar falls this year I'm putting the year end post out on the last day of the year with no post Friday due to the holiday. The number of posts for the year ended up at...

WCF RIA Services are not a part of the base framework install. That means that when it's time to move your application from your development machine to some other system you're the one that's responsible for installing the WCF RIA Services system files...

Virtual machine images for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 are now available for download. Using a virtual machine image allows you to try out software without having a dedicated machine for testing. The machine image is available in a variety of formats. On...

Azure AppFabric is a part of the Azure Services Platform that provides a service bus, an infrastructure piece for connecting together different components in a distributed application, and an access control service, allowing integration of those connected...

The CLR team has recently released a fix for slow startup of asynchronous IO threads that may affect WCF users. After startup, asynchronous IO threads are created at a slow pace to avoid spikes in the number of threads. Having extra idle threads consume...

Last week also delivered onto us a release candidate for ASP.NET MVC 2. MVC is a model-view-controller framework on top of the existing ASP.NET runtime that separates display and application logic as well as makes test-driven development of ASP.NET applications...

Windows Identity Foundation is an add-on for .Net 3.5 that provides support for building applications that use claims-based security. Claims-based security is the model used to implement single sign on, federation, delegation, and similar types of cross...

Earlier this week marked the releases of Mono 2.6, an open source implementation of C# and the Common Language Runtime, as well as Moonlight 2, an open source implementation of Silverlight 2. Mono 2.6 marks the first substantial implementation of...

Can I modify the message filters used by a routing service after the service is started? No, the filter objects are not thread safe. Modifying the message filters while the routing service is running creates the risk of getting incorrect results while...

UDDI is a standardized enterprise repository for cataloging web services and other modules according to geography, organizations, or other categorization schemes. A common use for UDDI is service discovery among a set of trusted nodes. If you've been...

A few weeks ago I wrote about the October update to the training kit for Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4 . Soon afterwards though, updates came out for the Windows 7 training kit and then at PDC the training kits for Windows Azure and security. Training...

The folks at .Net Rocks have been doing a number of interviews over the past few months on web service security as part of their regularly running show. These are very casual conversations, each about an hour long, covering a variety of topics with the...

Our customer experience team has published a new article describing how to configure MSMQ activation when using workflow services . Queued communication is the typical mechanism used for communicating with long-running workflow services when the client...

The next iteration of MIX is coming March 15-17th, 2010. MIX is the conference in Las Vegas for designers and developers focused on building applications on the web and interested in learning about Microsoft's web development platform, tools, and cloud...

It's been a while since I last did a trip around the work being done by the standards organizations for XML and web services but I noticed a flurry of recent activity at W3C. Newly minted is the recommendation for the third edition of XML namespaces...

Ten labs for AppFabric and .Net 4 are available on MSDN virtual labs. Virtual labs allow you to borrow a virtual machine for a while, giving you the opportunity to try out the lab online with no setup or installation required. You get the machine and...

Why does changing the name of a parameter in a service contract break compatibility with existing clients? Each named part of the message that appears in metadata or as part of the wire protocol needs to come up with a name from somewhere. We...

I'm trying to validate the structure of messages against schema but there are SOAP headers that I don't recognize. How do I check that these headers are correct? SOAP headers already have a mechanism for saying whether you are required to deal with...

It's been a while since I've talked about the Managed Extensibility Framework, but there were two recent announcements: a new preview release and news that MEF is coming as a part of Silverlight 4. The Managed Extensibility Framework makes it easier...

Now that Windows 7 is starting to see a lot of usage, I've had a few questions about installing hotfixes from product support for WCF issues when dealing with both Windows Vista/Server 2008 and Windows 7/Server 2008R2 systems. The two platforms are...

Silverlight 3 introduced an out of browser mode that provided a standalone experience for running Silverlight applications using the same execution sandbox model as when running in the browser. For the upcoming Silverlight 4, the out of browser support...