A few months ago I wrote this post about my diagnosis with Adiposis Dolorosa (Dercum's Disease) . After writing it I had a brief reprieve from the symptoms and for a while I was able to work part time. Then in September I had surgery to remove some of...

I've been thinking about application blocks lately. It turns out that of all the things that our team ( Patterns & Practices ) application blocks seem to be the one thing that people most easily connect with. The problem I have is that there are so...

Here is the scenario... Every day you get a text file with a number of financial records in a fixed length format. Your job is to identify any new or changed records from the previous day and be able to produce an output file in the same format containing...

You know you are a geek when You miss coding like a fisherman misses fishing. You give up an evening of online gaming to write code instead. You wake up in the middle of the night with an idea that is so good you have to try it...right now...

Recently I was doing a review of some .NET 3.5 WCF REST code based on the REST Starter Kit to see what it would take to move it to .NET 4. The more I looked at the code and thought about it deeply I realized that the mechanics of exposing a service over...

Nearly every day I get email from someone asking for help.  I wish I had time to answer every question.  I used to answer more of them but recently I was diagnosed with Adiposis Dolorosa. Adiposis dolorosa , or Dercum disease, is a rare condition...

There are a few development tools that I just can’t live without. ReSharper A few years ago I was sitting in Glenn Block’s office when I noticed some strange additions to Visual Studio.  When I asked him about it he said “That’s ReSharper” and I...

So you want to know how the state machine really works? Take a look at the WF4 State Machine Explorer .  This sample is designed to show you how StateMachine works with activities. There are three transitions from State1. To State 2 which is triggered...

It seems to me that people who want to use open source projects have a big problem. Several problems actually, but perhaps the most insidious of these is quality. How do you know if that really cool project you heard about is good quality design and code...

Wow - Putting together a webcast series is a lot of work. I just finished the slides for configuration and data acess and I think you are really going to like what you see. I hope you will join us for the webcasts. The podcasts are really doing well....

Now would be a good time to start my day...if I were in London where it is 10:46 GMT but here I am at 2:46 wide awake writing my blog. I'm sorry I can't help it but I am really pumped about Enterprise Library and the great work that Tom, Bill, Scott,...

Wow - any time you mention open source, you touch a nerve don't you... First off - just because I work for Microsoft doesn't mean that I am against open source. In fact, I work in a team that builds class libraries and shares the source with the community...

Join me as once again I tackle the learning curve of WCF with a deployment challenge.  Today - WCF vs. ASMX deployment. Note: As the new WCF evangelist I have to say that WCF is clearly the future of web services.  In fact, the WCF team owns...

In designing software there is a fundamental trade-off between simplicity and power.  Great products have just the right mix of the two.  When it comes to REST the team has been grappling with this balance.  If you have seen the WCF REST...

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. Windows Server AppFabric provides tools for managing and monitoring your web services and workflows. WCF HTTP Service is a service...

For the last 5 years I've been a Technical Evangelist in the Developer & Platform Evangelism Group (DPE) at Microsoft.  Today is my last day as a Technical Evangelist.  Starting on Monday I’m going to be a Program Manager in the AppFabric...

Remember the 4 tenets of SOA?  One of them is that Boundaries are explicit.  When somebody sends data to your service it is just like when you cross an international border into another country.  Just a couple of hours drive north of us...

After my previous post where I showed you how you can eliminate the .SVC extension from your URI someone asked me another good question. When I add the route I can access the service from the route and the path to the SVC file.  Can I block the path...

Here is an interesting question from the MSDN ArchitectureGeneral forum that I decided to answer. To throw exceptions or use error codes – that is thequestion… Since God has not handed down any commandments related tothis I think this is a...

One thing that many web sites do is to verify email addresses by sending you an email to complete registration.  I decided to build a Registration system for ASP.NET MVC using Windows Workflow Foundation. When you create a new ASP.NET MVC web site...

Recently saw this question in the MSDN Workflow Forum Is there a (SetState) in the new StateMachine Activity? Many users of Workflow in .NET 3.5 took advantage of the StateMachineWorkflowInstance class to determine what state a workflow is in, and also...

You know those little tools you build to help in your development?  The ones that you slapped together in a hurry and might not work all the time but you put up with them because you don’t want to take the time to fix them?  Well CleanProject...

I am a musician. Over the years I have played keyboards in many bands, traveling and performing mostly as a hobby. I’ll never forget what one of my mentors taught me. He said “The rest is just as important as the note” The rest is the part of the song...

As I write this I’m riding BART on my way to SFO to fly back to Seattle . I spent two days here in San Francisco where I had a chance to meet and talk with a number of fascinating people. The theme of this trip is Enterprise Library and the excitement...

Don't you love new beginnings?  At the beginning of a year it seems anything is possible.  Perhaps that is why we feel compelled to think about how we can make 2009 a better year than last year.  I see that my last blog entry was Nov 21...