I've been busy recently writing sample applications that use Windows Azure Service Bus and Windows Azure web roles and Windows Azure (damn I'm tired of typing brand names now) Access Control Service namespaces. And each time I do, I create a new namespace...

This release of the Patterns & Practices Enterprise Integration Pack is simply wonderful and is required for real-world Azure development. Read the announcement for the full list of features, but in particular I want to call out the autoscaling and...

Hi all. If you're in the Bay Area and want to get up to speed on Windows Azure -- whether you want to learn how to use it or whether you want to validate your own approach! -- MVP Scott Klein of Blue Syntax Software ( blog ) (author and co-author of many...

The WSDL url http://advertisersapi.doubleclick.net/v1.12/api/dfa-api/campaign?wsdl was used by a customer with the Svcutil.exe tool to generate a proxy class and associated message and data classes, and it worked fine. But when they tried to use the Add...

Ian Miers has posted the code for doing "good" crypto for static data storage on the phone, but more importantly written about it, here . Understanding this code, the problems it poses, and the processes it implements is important to doing things with...

I have this: private void LoadSupportSolutionsSection(ItemCollection itemCollection, XElement category) { // Solution, url att, Title, Description. var solutions = from sol in category.Elements("Solution") select new TreeViewItem { Header = sol.Element...

A note directly related to the larger blog project started with the last post, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ralph.squillace/archive/2011/01/03/cloud-data-a-newbie-series-the-issues.aspx . While I have been working on a lot of phone applications, almost all...

It's been an interesting couple of years for me -- I've been assigned to two different projects that have failed to find their way to RTM as originally conceived -- which cut my blog writing down a bit. It happens; I've been working most recently on some...

This past month I've been doing some work on the AppFabric Service Bus . It's hard to get a grip on the "feature" associated with this technology at first glance, but I'll take my first shot right here: "The Windows Azure platform Service Bus enables...

The Microsoft "Oslo" repository " provides a robust, enterprise-hardened storage location for the data models. It takes advantage of the best features of SQL Server 2008 to deliver on critical areas such as scalability, security, and performance ." The...

It has occurred in the forum ( http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/oslo/threads ) that people sometimes don't have access to SQL Server 2008 -- or they don't think they do . In point of fact, however, you can use SQL Server 2008 Express editions...

Strangely enough, although I love the company I work for, I'm not interested in technologies that we put out that aren't really the best. Often, we end up making them the best through iterations, and that's wonderful. Sometimes we don't, and we have great...

I've spent quite a bit of the past two years working on "Oslo" and find it an amazing challenge to explain to people who aren't database gurus. Have a look -- it's an amazing set of tools to begin developing .NET applications with modeling techniques...

I was recently asked to have a look at some really nice How To topics on WCF security that the Patterns & Practices people have worked up, and am quite happy with them; so much so I wanna tell them to let us fold them back into the regular SDK documentation...

I haven't posted for a while because I've been working on other stuff, and much of that work has encouraged me to think hard about the concept of the ServiceDescription class, the root of what is called the Description Hierarchy that I posted about previously...

One of the things we didn't get a chance to write as much about as we wanted to by RTM -- but will fix soon -- is the description tree. The service-side description tree consists of the heirarchy of objects starting with ServiceDescription class. The...

Two posts ago I wrote the following post about how to build a duplex service and client that does NOT use sessions. Once I wrote the sample, I wanted to extend it to provide some more flexibility. I've done that now, but in so doing, I ran across some...

I've been having a conversation with Scott Klein, who is busy writing a book on WCF ( http://www.amazon.com/Professional-WCF-Pr%20ogramming-Development-Communication/dp/0470089849/sr=1-2/qid=1161195651/ref=sr_1_2/102-4898838-8936%20108?ie=UTF8&s=books...

Duplex is neato, definitely, because among other things it allows a service to push information at clients as it sees fit. You could just have two services, and one service throws an endpoint at the other and then listens for stuff coming back, too, but...

It would best be said, in the end, that a client object returns from an operation call (including a one-way operation) when the outbound message is sent by the transport. This can be a network call, but need not be. The most obvious example is handing...

As I mentioned in the previous post, there are scenarios in which one-way operations can block a client. After investigation I've discovered yet another, shown to me by John Justice, Michael Marucheck , and Ed Pinto . The scenario is quite specific...

Although I am responsible for writing a good portion of the programmer documentation for WCF, there are always little things that you "realize" suddenly that you didn't quite understand. Today, I learned from Shy Cohen and Maheshwar Jayaraman (thanks...

Yesterday I outlined how to export custom policy assertions and why you would do such a thing. One thing I failed to note explicitly, but that should be obvious, is that policy assertions are merely XML elements. At a fundamental level, that's all they...

I've been busy for a while trying to update the documentation for all the changes that have happened since the February release. That meant, definitely, that I hadn't blogged for a while. But now I've got some things that it's important to get on about...

This is something that tripped me up for a while, so I figure that while I'm dumping little tidbits I might as well offer this one. When you implement an I*Behavior, the Apply*Behavior methods you are passed a ServiceDescription, or ContractDescription...