Chris Bowen's Blog : .NET 3.0

WPF-Based Yahoo Messenger for Vista Available

cbowen — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 23:40:46 GMT

As a pretty cool example of the effects that are possible with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Yahoo has just announced the availability of the preview release of Yahoo Messenger for Vista.

Download it from:

http://messenger.yahoo.com/windowsvista.php

As of today, they've announced support for 64-bit Vista as well.

-Chris

Technorati tags: WPF, Vista, Yahoo, .NET

Speaking on WF at NE VB Professionals User Group Tonight (8/2)

cbowen — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 19:17:12 GMT

Just a reminder that I'll be speaking with the New England Visual Basic Professionals User Group in Waltham tonight (8/2) from 6:15 to 8:30. By request, I'll run through the basics of Workflow Foundation, then we'll devote the remainder of the meeting to more intermediate topics such as persistence and host/workflow communications.

-Chris

Technorati tags: User Groups, Events, WF, Massachusetts, Visual Basic

Announcing: Essential Windows Communication Foundation

cbowen — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:33:09 GMT

Word's getting out, so it's time to acknowledge it on this blog.

If you were at TechEd, you may have noticed copies of a sample chapter of Essential Windows Communication Foundation being given out at the Addison-Wesley booth.

The eagle eyed among you (I heard from a bunch of people, actually) noticed the author listing on the front...

I'm very happy to be working with some of the best minds in WCF I know, Steve Resnick and Rich Crane. Steve and Rich are fellow Microsoft guys based at the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham, where they work with customers on this technology every day. Steve and Rich are doing the lion's share of the chapters and I'm writing several chapters in my areas of speciality.

It's also good to be working on a .NET Development Series book, with a rich heritage of solid developer titles that have come before us in the series - Essential ASP.NET, Essential .NET, Framework Design Guidelines, and others.

So, when?

Look for the book near the time when Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 are released. That's certainly no coincidence as we're writing everything from the ground up to be current with the changes to WCF that those technologies are bringing.

-Chris

Technorati tags: WCF, Books, .NET 3.0, Windows Communication Foundation

Embedding Active XAML in PowerPoint

cbowen — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 05:53:35 GMT

[File under "Cool Presenter Tricks"]

Simon Guest posted about a nice little trick for embedding XAML in a PowerPoint slide. What makes it all happen is finding an add-in for PowerPoint to display web pages from a slide.

Simon points us to Shyam Pillai's "LiveWeb" add-in. Run the setup there and PowerPoint will offer a web page embedding feature.

I must say I'm impressed, and already thinking of ways I can spice up my own presentations. With the add in, you can link to local or remote web pages and have them display as they would in a browser, within a PowerPoint show. You can event scroll the pages and click on the elements.

Of course, the main point of Simon's post was to mention that you can link to XAML pages (such as .xbap and .xaml), but the fact that I can include local or live web pages in my presentations is very cool all by itself.

In the above screenshot, I've (quickly) wired up a slide to point to Charles Petzold's "Teapot" .xaml example. Though as Simon mentions, there's room for extensions/options, I'm happy to say it otherwise "just works".

-Chris

Controlling Page Flow with Workflow Foundation - Sample Available

cbowen — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 01:57:23 GMT

Matt Winkler gave a session this week at TechEd where he described how to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) to control the page flow of a client-facing application. This has certainly been a popular request since the early days of ASP.NET (giving rise to such MVC frameworks as Maverick.NET.) A preview of this technology was given at TechEd 2006, but didn't make it into the current release bits.

The good news is that the Page Flow sample is now available with full source code. It includes a new PageFlow project template, a new Navigator workflow type, and new controls (InteractionActivity and InteractionGroupActivity) for Visual Studio. This sample can be used with multiple UI technologies (e.g. ASP.NET, WPF, etc.)

Read Matt's Post for full details and a sample use case.

-Chris

Today's Maine Developer Network WCF Presentation Postponed

cbowen — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 17:32:13 GMT

What's with this white stuff outside my window in April? Well, apparently there's much more of it up in Maine, so we're going to postpone my WCF presentation for the Maine Developer Network today.

The new date will be exactly one week out, same place, same time - Thursday, April 12th from 1:30 to 3:30 at the Deering Building (on Route 9 / Hospital Street) in Augusta, ME.

Check out the Maine Developer Network newsletter for directions.

See you then!

-Chris

Roadshow Update - Portland and Manchester

cbowen — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:43:13 GMT

Two more stops made and one more to go on the first tour of Bob & Chris' MSDN Roadshow!

Portland, ME

We visited the Portland, ME area and had a great audience brave the should-never-get-this-cold cold to come to the MESDA facility in Westbrook.

[Again, thanks to Bob for being Mr. Photographer!]

We're returning with the Roadshow in May, but I'll be back in the area on April 5th at 1:30 to speak with the Maine Developer Network user group in Augusta on WCF and again on April 12th to speak with the Maine Bytes User Group on WPF in Portland.

Manchester, NH

Two days later we were in Manchester, NH. First of all, we had an amazing turnout. The turnout was so amazing that we couldn't fit in the room! If you weren't there, you missed out on Bob and I performing what we're now calling the ol' "Manchester Swap". We had an overflow room where we each took turns repeating our sessions from the main room.

[Our Manchester Zune winner, Jason Hull!]

Rest assured that we won't be in the same facility for our next visit to New Hampshire. Knowing how many of you are interested in attending, we'll find another place with plenty of room.

Thank you all for being good sports about the unusual logistics!

Session Follow-up

Some additional details from the week's questions and discussions:

Choosing a WCF binding depends on a number of factors. Here are some resources to help you decide:
- System-Provided Bindings documentation on MSDN
- Binding decision chart on Dennis van de Stelt's blog
- Bindings and Security on MSDN
The WCF Service Trace Viewer always generates a lot of interest. You may also want to check out the Live Service Trace Viewer which uses customized listeners to let you observe a WCF service while it is running as opposed to the after-the-fact viewing using the SDK's Service Trace Viewer.
There were a number of questions about WCF instance management. There's a great article on instancing, sessions, throttling, etc. on MDSN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/06/wcfessentials/default.aspx
WCF's svcutil.exe tool (which we used to create client proxies) has more features than we could cover in the session. Take a look the MSDN svcutil documentation for other options, such as service code validation, metadata document generate and other code generation options.
There is an interesting article on Workflow Foundation (WF) performance at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa973808.aspx.

Roadshow Content

We're still working on a permanent home for the Roadshow materials and information, but we've gathered our content from the current tour and you can now download the presentations as a ZIP from the ArcStreamEast.net site.

Next Stop

We'll be visiting the Microsoft Offices in Farmington, CT on Tuesday (3/20) for our last stop until May. Registration is actually "sold out" for the event and have been taking waitlist registrations!

-Chris

The Roadshow Has Begun!

cbowen — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 19:38:00 GMT

We'd like to extend a big thank you to everyone who attended the first two stops of Bob & Chris' MSDN Roadshow! Both events were well attended and, equally important, had active and engaged audiences to keep things interesting. We spent each day covering the four technologies of the .NET 3.0 Framework - Windows Communication Foundation, Windows CardSpace, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows Presentation Foundation.

Our first event was held at the R.I.T. Inn just outside of Rochester, NY. This being our first visit to the R.I.T. Inn, it turns out the facility is great and the location was very convenient, leading to a strong turnout of 60 people.

[Thanks to Bob for taking the pictures! Bob also has pictures of our Zune winners in his posts (1|2).]

We got back on the road Wednesday, driving from Rochester to Burlington, VT in about 7 hours. A great day for driving and some very beautiful scenery along the way, listening to tunes from Bob's Zune.

Thursday's event was held at the Sheraton in Burlington and it seemed that everyone knew everyone there. I'm sure much of the credit for that goes to Julie Lerman for running the fantastic Vermont .NET User Group, which is celebrating it's 5th anniversary. Congratulations, Julie (and thanks for the jar of Bove's sauce!)

Follow-up information from the events:

I showed how to enable tracing/logging in a WCF service and how to visualize the collected data using the Service Trace Viewer tool from the the SDK. If you'd like to see/hear more on this, Scott Hanselman recently posted an episode on this very subject.
I mentioned that there were two excellent blog posts on enabling Workflow persistence and tracking. They can be found here (Persistence) and here (Tracking). The tracking post includes details on the Workflow Monitor SDK sample application I demonstrated (which is itself a great example of designer rehosting.)
In Rochester, I ran into a security dialog when running a sample WCF service. A small change to my app.config was in order, as described in this blog post by Eric Johnson.

...and some random notes from the road:

Total number of errantly-thrown orange stress balls: 2
Chocolate-covered espresso beans and beef jerky are the Official Traveling Foods of the Roadshow.
The Dinosaur in Rochester is hands-down the best BBQ that Bob and I have ever had.
When navigating while Bob is driving, don't give him choices!
Bove's is still my favorite restaurant in Burlington.

Next week we're visiting Portland, ME (3/6) and Manchester, NH (3/8). The final stop on our first tour is Farmington, CT (3/20). If you're in the area, we'd love to see you there!

We're also working on setting the content for our next Roadshow. Let us know what you'd like to hear! We'll soon be announcing the dates and content for the next Roadshow, so keep an eye on our blogs.

-Chris

Announcing Bob and Chris' MSDN Roadshow!

cbowen — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 23:33:00 GMT

Bob Familiar and I are busting out of our home bases in Massachusetts and taking our long-winded rants and questionable demos on the roads across the Northeast! In the coming weeks, we'll be bringing the latest in developer- and architect-focused content to a town near you.

Join us for a full day of no-fluff deep technical content, plenty of code, 100% guaranteed-to-run demos*, and of course giveaways throughout with a chance to win a Zune at day's end! [* We'll define "run" as we go.]

Roadshow Schedule and Registration

Rochester, NY	February 27^th, 2007	8:30am-4:00pm	Click Here to Register!
Burlington, VT	March 1^st, 2007	8:30am-4:00pm	Click Here to Register!
Portland, ME	March 6^th, 2007	8:30am-4:00pm	Click Here to Register!
Manchester, NH	March 8^th, 2007	8:30am-4:00pm	Click Here to Register!
Farmington, CT	March 20^th, 2007	8:30am-4:00pm	Click Here to Register!

Event Agenda

For this tour, we're focusing on all things .Net Framework 3.0. Here's the agenda:

08:30am – Arrive, check in, grab a nosh and a seat

09:00 – 10:15 – Windows Communication Foundation

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft's unified framework for building secure, reliable, transacted, and interoperable distributed applications. Learn how to leverage the new features in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to make a smooth transition to a service-orientation. The capabilities exposed through this new addition to the .NET framework will enable the core building blocks of connected systems such as data & service contracts, security, reliability, administration, and management

10:15 – 10:30 – Take a break and communicate

10:30 – 12:00 – Windows CardSpaces

Windows CardSpace enables users to provide their digital identities in a familiar, secure and easy way. In the physical world we use business cards, credit cards and membership cards. Online with CardSpace we use a variety of virtual cards to identify ourselves, each retrieving data from an identity provider. Don't struggle with usernames and passwords, just choose an information card! This session will delve into the architecture and implementation of CardSpaces.

12:00-01:00 – Grab a lunch and ponder your identity

01:00 – 02:15 –Workflow Foundation

Workflow Foundation (WF), a component of the .NET Framework 3.0, enables you to quickly and reliably implement workflows and business rules in your applications. WF provides a framework for constructing sequential and state-machine based workflows for any .NET application or service and includes tools to effectively manage and modify those workflows. In this session, we'll introduce the major concepts and purpose of WF, demonstrate the creation and maintenance of workflows with Visual Studio 2005, and show the potential uses of workflows within your applications.

02:15-02:30 – Take a break and go with the flow

02:30 – 03:45 – Windows Presentation Foundation

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is Microsoft’s new strategic User Interface technology designed to provide richer, high-fidelity, applications using an optimized developer/designer workflow. Learn how to leverage the new features in WPF such as XAML to create visually stunning interfaces to enhance capabilities and user experience of your applications.

03:45 – 04:00 – Zune Giveaway

-Chris

Speaking on WF at Rhode Island .NET User Group - 1/3/2007

cbowen — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 01:09:06 GMT

I will be giving a session on Windows Workflow Foundation for the Rhode Island .NET User Group tomorrow night, January 3rd, from 6-8 PM at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI. There is also a social hour from 5-6 with soda and pizza.

Here is the abstract:

Workflow Foundation (WF), a component of the .NET Framework 3.0, enables you to quickly and reliably implement workflows and business rules in your applications. WF provides a framework for constructing sequential and state-machine based workflows for any .NET application or service and includes tools to effectively manage and modify those workflows. In this session, we'll introduce the major concepts and purpose of WF, demonstrate the creation and maintenance of workflows with Visual Studio 2005, and show the potential uses of workflows within your applications.

The group requests an RSVP if you plan to attend. Hope to see you there!

-Chris

ArcStream Announcement

cbowen — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 23:18:00 GMT

Bob Familiar, my Architect Evangelist counterpart in New England, has posted details of upcoming events related to the arcStream initiative:

December 11th - arcCouncil meeting on "Composite Application Architecture and User Experience"
January 11th - arcLab session: "Take a lap around .NET 3.0"
There are also many arcCasts on a variety of subjects coming up as well.

More details and registration can be found at the arcStreamEast.net site.

-Chris