In my last couple of posts I explored the concepts of Visibility and Supportability as properties of an architecture.  These are principles that architects must keep in mind when designing user centered architectures, systems that as Frank Lloyd...

Recently somebody asked me about doing APIKey verification in .NET 4. Previously in .NET 3.5 we provided the REST Starter Kit which included a fair bit of server side code to enable a collection of RequestInterceptor objects that we showed doing API Key...

WCF Data Services provides a very simple model driven way to expose data using REST and the OData format. As I was preparing my talk for Tech-Ed on Implementing REST in .NET I was asking myself if there would be any value in using Windows Server AppFabric...

Most of the time I write simple apps that run in the local ASP.NET development server. I noticed when I started working with IIS more because of Windows Server AppFabric that my routes were not working when the web application is deployed in IIS. For...

This morning I awoke to a bright sunny day and thought to myself… What shall I do today? Unlike most people I have a great deal of freedom to be as creative as possible at helping people to build great applications with .NET using WCF, WF4 and...

Today I’m starting on another spike project.  So far there are only questions to investigate, no answers.  I’m sharing my plans with you because I believe doing so might help some of you and I’m hopeful that you might share your insights with...

Now available Download the AppFabric WCF Service Template C# Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. Windows Server AppFabric provides tools for managing and monitoring...

I love Task<T>.  It has to be one of the finest innovations in the framework in the past few years.  Recently I was reviewing some old WCF documentation How to: Implement an Asynchronous Service Operation which was probably written in...

Recently I asked you to vote on topics you want to see on endpoint.tv . Coming in at #3 was this question on how to Unit Test WF4 Workflows. Because Workflows range from very simple activities to long and complex multi-step processes this can be a...

In my previous previous post on the WCF Fault Spike and the other post on 4 Tenets of Service Oriented Data Validation I discussed some options and best practices for service data validation with WCF.  In this post I want to consider how the same...

“The important point is that our test can’t control what that dependency returns to our code under test or how it behaves (if we wanted to simulate an exception, for example). That’s when we use stubs .” – The Art of Unit...

This morning I was in an interesting email thread with some of my Microsoft colleagues about the use of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) on a load balanced server farm.  The question that started the whole thing was that a customer had asked their...

Lately I've been working with the product teams on building new things that will be revealed at PDC 2008 (you are going aren't you?)  such as WCF and WF in .NET 4.0 and "Dublin" .  I'll have many more details on this to come but today...

Just released the November 2008 version of the WCF REST Starter Kit Hands On Lab .  This drop now includes a full lab on the REST Collection template.  With unit test coverage that demonstrates testing of a RESTful service for GET, PUT, POST...

Kudos to the Windows 7 team for building an awesome feedback loop.  Lately I had several tools fail when I tried to install them.  Today the Windows 7 notification window gave me the solution.  The crashes were not caused by the installers...

This is getting downright annoying... As if the spammers haven't already done enough damage to the internet, now they are attacking my blog! Yep - this really annoying dude keeps posting replies to my blog entries with links to his stupid website with...

This week we are finally taking the wraps off of Workflow 4.0 and Monday we had a great talk from Kenny Wolf introducing Workflow 4.0.  The great news is that it is already live on Channel 9 along with some other episodes of endpoint.tv where I asked...

If you have seen the REST Starter Kit (Preview 1) perhaps you noticed a TODO comment about the ServiceBehavior attribute.  We decided to make this comment a little more explicit in Preview 2.   /// TODO: Modify the service behavior settings...

In the past year I learned a lot about unit testing and TDD in general.  After meeting some very passionate TDD type guys like Peter Provost (see this ARCast.TV interview for more) and Roy Osherove I became convinced that this style of development...

I love playing computer games (probably a little too much).  Of course when you first get started you are the guy who gets killed all the time because you don't know what you are supposed to do or where the secret stash is.  After a while of...

Funny how it happens, but things change don't they?  Our applications, as perfect as they are when brand new, grow and change over time and like teenagers, sometimes these changes are quite painful. Over the past few weeks we have been speaking to...

At Tech-Ed this year I felt a new vibe from the people I talked to.  This feeling has been there before but this year it was even more pronounced.  It was the feeling that your brain just couldn't take any more.  In the past we used to...

Every 2 or 3 years I get the yearning to make a change.  After 2.5 years of doing ARCast and speaking about architecture I've decided once again to make a career change.  Starting Feb 8th I will become the primary WCF / WF evangelist at Microsoft...

Did I mention that I'm not the worlds leading expert on Windows Workflow Foundation?  Well if I didn't please allow me to say it again. Like you I'm just learning a lot of new stuff.  To get my arms around WF I'm reading the book Windows Workflow...

Lots of people create state machines.  There are many examples on the web of people who are building class libraries to make it easy to create a state machine.  These people typically don’t need (or want) to use a workflow designer or see a...