Nicholas Allen's Indigo Blog

AppFabric Talks and Slides

Windows Server AppFabric is a set of integrated technologies that make it easier to build, scale, and manage WCF and WF applications running inside of IIS. AppFabric is the brand name for the hosting and caching features previously called Dublin and Velocity.

A beta release of Windows Server AppFabric is available for use with .Net 4.

• Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1

I gave one of the talks on Windows Server AppFabric, covering the extensibility in terms of hosting web service applications and integrating with workflow services. My slides aren't showing up on the PDC web site so you can get them from the attachment to this post. Mark Fussell and Murali Krishnaprasad also talked about AppFabric, covering how to use the hosting and caching features, respectively.

Application Server Extensibility with Microsoft .NET 4 and Windows Server AppFabric by Nicholas Allen

.NET 4 and Windows Server AppFabric provide new application hosting, tracking, and persistence capabilities. Learn the benefits of different hosting options and how to choose the right option for your scenario. Learn about custom tracking providers and how the built-in tracking system can be extended to meet your custom business data monitoring requirements. Learn about the new subsystem for managing durable application state using Microsoft SQL Server or custom application-specific stores.

Workflow Services and Windows Server AppFabric by Mark Fussell

Learn how to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 4, and Windows Server AppFabric (formerly code name "Dublin") to build and manage scalable, reliable, and highly-available applications. Discover the power of WF to build and coordinate WCF services and implement logic on the middle tier. Enable sophisticated messaging patterns with correlation, enhanced transaction support, durable services, and config-based activation. Learn how AppFabric makes it easier to deploy, manage, and monitor WCF and WF applications.

Scaling Your Data Tier with Windows Server AppFabric by Murali Krishnaprasad

The distributed in-memory caching capabilities of Windows Server AppFabric (formerly code name "Velocity") will change how you think about scaling your Microsoft .NET-connected applications. Come learn how the distributed nature of the "Velocity" cache allows large amounts of data to be stored in-memory for extremely fast access, how AppFabric's integration with Microsoft ASP.NET makes it easy to add low-latency data caching across the Web farm, and discover the unique high availability features of AppFabric which will bring new degrees of scale to your data tier.

Data Services Joins the WCF Family

As announced at PDC, along with RIA Services, ADO.NET Data Services are also joining in the WCF brand. Data Services are REST-based web services that expose a data model that can be consumed by web clients. Data Services use URIs to address data from a storage system and supports a variety of formats for representing that data, such as JSON or ATOM.

The new name is WCF Data Services although there are no immediate product changes. Data Services already use WCF for communication and the current release plans are not changing. However, you may start seeing a closer unification in the future.

In celebration, I've added WCF Data Services to the WCF technology page right next to WCF RIA Services.

Pablo Castro did a session at PDC on WCF Data Services if you're interested in watching the video.

ADO.NET Data Services: What’s new with the RESTful data services framework by Pablo Castro

Join this code-heavy session to discuss the upcoming version of ADO.NET Data Services, a simple, standards-based RESTful service interface for data access. Come see new features in action and learn how Microsoft products are using ADO.NET Data Services to expose and consume Data Services to achieve their goals around data sharing.

Holiday Technology Update

Today is a light day because of the holiday but I did want to put out this note that the technology page has been updated to cover the recent announcements, releases, and renaming. I'm planning to kick off its next major round of additions starting tomorrow and continuing through next week in conjunction with posts on Silverlight, data, and federation.

ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta

And finally, one last PDC keynote announcement from the first day was the beta release of 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 easier. MVC could be used with a variety of types of web applications but is frequently associated with REST applications.

The ASP.NET MVC 2 beta is currently only supported on .Net 3.5. This is because the MVC 2 beta shares a common component with a different version from Visual Studio 2010 beta 2. You currently need to try ASP.NET MVC 2 together with Visual Studio 2008.

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta
• ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Source Code
• ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Release Notes

Scott Hanselman did a session at PDC on ASP.NET MVC 2 if you're interested in watching the video.

ASP.NET MVC 2: Ninjas Still on Fire Black Belt Tips by Scott Hanselman

Having the customer on your back to deliver features on time and under budget with tight deadlines can make you feel like you're being chased by ninjas on fire. Join Scott Hanselman and he'll walk through lots of tips and tricks to get the most out of the ASP.NET MVC 2 framework and deliver work quickly and with style. Come see ASP.NET MVC 2's better productivity features as we make the most of several key features.

WCF RIA Services Beta

Also during the second PDC keynote came the announcement of the previously announced RIA Services being given the name WCF RIA Services. WCF RIA Services simplify building multi-tier applications where the client tier is using Silverlight. WCF RIA Services are able to use all of the features of WCF while reducing the amount of work spent on service configuration, contract specification, data validation, and deployment.

A beta release of WCF RIA Services is available for both Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4.

• WCF RIA Services Beta for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• WCF RIA Services Preview for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

There were several sessions at PDC covering WCF RIA Services. Here they are with video available.

Building Amazing Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft .NET RIA Services by Brad Abrams

Learn how to build n-tier Rich Internet Applications (RIA) on Silverlight by tapping the power of .NET RIA Services. Walk you through an example of building an application from scratch using the pattern run-time components and tools provided by .NET RIA Services. See how it helps you write application logic to expose data and operations in a carefully controlled fashion using tools integrated into Visual Studio with support for validation, authentication, authorization and handling units of work.

Brad also has some extra content related to his talk available for download.

Mastering Microsoft .NET RIA Services by Dinesh Kulkarni

This advanced-level .NET RIA Services session provides an "under-the-covers" view of how the technology works. Come learn about common architectural patterns, key design principles, and tools to work with a variety of data access layers, application logic patterns and client-usage scenarios. Examine query and unit of work patterns, custom methods, validation, authentication and authorization metadata, authoring custom validations, and using asynchronous operations effectively on the client. Hear tips and tricks to help you get the most out of .NET RIA Services in advanced scenarios. This session assumes existing experience with .NET RIA Services.

Developing REST Applications with the .NET Framework by Henrik Nielsen

Come hear an overview of the REST principles and why REST is becoming popular beyond traditional Web applications. Learn how to write applications that produce and consume RESTful services using the .NET Framework 4 and the improvements we have planned for future versions of the .NET Framework.

Silverlight 4 Developer Beta

During the second PDC keynote came the announcement of a beta release for Silverlight 4. Silverlight 4 adds a number of new media features as well as extends capabilities for applications that run outside of the web browser. The beta release is primarily intended for software developers to test out the new features.

• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Beta Offline Documentation

The tools download includes the developer runtime, the software development kit, and integration with Visual Studio 2010. You do need to use Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 when working with Silverlight 4 applications.

There were several sessions at PDC covering Silverlight 4. Here they are with video available.

Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview by Karen Corby

Take a tour of the new features in Silverlight 4 including a dive into some of the new ready for business features like printing, rich text support, and expanded databinding support. Also hear about exciting Silverlight additions to the media stack, and get an introduction to the Silverlight 4 elevated trust out of browser model.

Improving and Extending the Sandbox with Microsoft Silverlight 4 by Joe Stegman

Explore enhancements to the app experience, the ability to host HTML content within Silverlight, and playback rights-protected media when offline. Get details on the new extensions to the sandbox that allow apps to run with elevated privileges and access the file system or interop with desktop components via Automation.

Building Line of Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 4 by David Poll

Learn about enhancements to data binding and data validation as well as new support for rich text & printing in the platform that allow you to build compelling LOB user experiences. In addition, you will see how you can incorporate webcam & microphone support into your applications using Silverlight 4.

Watch the PDC 2009 Keynotes

The keynote videos from day 1 and day 2 of PDC 2009 are now available.

The day 1 keynote features Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia, and many other people coming on to present. This is the keynote talk where AppFabric was first announced.

The day 2 keynote features Steven Sinofsky and Scott Guthrie. If you're interested in Silverlight you'll particular want to watch this session.

I highly recommend watching both. The amount of planning and preparation that goes into producing these keynote talks is immense. There's a lot of material packed in on a very tight script and schedule.

More PDC Announcements: Azure Turning On, Azure AppFabric, and Dallas

On the cloud side there were also a variety of announcements coming from PDC as to future products and plans. Here's a few of them.

The .Net Services offerings I've talked about several times in the past, currently the service bus and access control services, is the start of a set of web-based developer services that simplify connecting and integrating applications through the cloud. The collection of services is being called Windows Azure platform AppFabric. Note the similar naming to Windows Server AppFabric that I wrote about yesterday.

Dallas is a newly announced service for discovering and subscribing to online data and image sources. The Dallas service gives publishers a unified way of provisioning and billing subscriptions while giving developers a consistent set of APIs for accessing the subscribed data.

Finally, the transition plans for the Azure platform itself have been announced to switch from being a preview service to a production service. Azure officially turns on at the beginning of 2010 while billing for the service starts the following month.

PDC Day 1 Announcement: AppFabric

One of the first day announcements at the PDC 2009 keynote was the unveiling of Windows Server AppFabric. Windows Server AppFabric is a set of integrated technologies that make it easier to build, scale, and manage web service applications that run inside of IIS. Included in AppFabric are the hosting features for WCF and WF previously called Dublin and the caching features for SQL Server previously called Velocity.

You can get a beta 1 of AppFabric today to try out with Windows Vista or later. In order to use AppFabric you'll also need to have .Net 4 beta 2 installed.

Now that the announcement is out of the way we've updated several of the talk descriptions. For example, the talk I'm giving Thursday is actually called Application Server Extensibility with Microsoft .NET 4 and Windows Server AppFabric.

Future of Moonlight

Taking a quick break from PDC, this prerecorded message is about Miguel de Icaza's comments last week on the future of Moonlight. Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight for Linux/X11. Cooperation between Microsoft and Novell was started for Moonlight in the summer of 2007.

Moonlight is closing in on targeting compatibility with Silverlight 2 and is looking ahead to compatibility with Silverlight 3. Miguel uses the opportunity to talk about some opportunities for prototyping new features covering media and integration. This is the first time I can think of where Moonlight has been pushing to develop support ahead of the main Silverlight release.

Related PDC Sessions for WCF and Workflow

Four talks each for WCF and WF, only one pair of which have conflicting times.

Here are the WCF talks with their schedules:

Accelerating Applications Using Windows HPC Server 2008 by Ming Xu in 502A on Tuesday at 1:30 PM

Learn how to accelerate your applications by multiple orders of magnitude using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Microsoft Excel, and Windows HPC Server 2008. See how easy it is to offload the calculations from a desktop application to an HPC Server Cluster using the HPC SOA programming model, with emphasis on performance tuning best practices.

Windows Identity Foundation Overview by Vittorio Bertocci in 403AB on Wednesday at 11:30 AM

Hear how Windows Identity Foundation makes advanced identity capabilities and open standards first class citizens in the Microsoft .NET Framework. Learn how the Claims Based access model integrates seamlessly with the traditional .NET identity object model while also giving developers complete control over every aspect of authentication, authorization, and identity-driven application behavior. See examples of the point and click tooling with tight Microsoft Visual Studio integration, advanced STS capabilities, and much more that Windows Identity Foundation consistently provides across on-premise, service-based, ASP.NET and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) applications.

Networking and Web Services in Microsoft Silverlight by Yavor Georgiev in Hall E on Wednesday at 3:15 PM

This session presents an overview of how to expose data to a Silverlight application by accessing SOAP Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services and REST services. In the WCF space, we cover Silverlight 3 approaches for securing services and improving their performance and maintainability. We also cover a specific message pattern called server push, which allows you to implement scenarios such as email clients and real-time chat. In the REST space, we walk through the Silverlight 3 client HTTP stack and new functionality it offers around HTTP verbs, headers, responses, and cross-domain access and talk about future plans for networking and Web services in Silverlight.

What’s New for Windows Communication Foundation 4 by Ed Pinto in Petree Hall D on Thursday at 10:00 AM

Learn about the investments made in Windows Communication Foundation 4 that add new capabilities for service composition and reduced configuration and deployment complexity. Discover how improvements to configuration, monitoring, and deployment are enhanced by Microsoft project code name "Dublin". See how the Routing Service makes it easier to build sophisticated intermediaries and how support for WS-Discovery adds flexibility to your services infrastructure.

Here are the WF talks with their schedules:

Spice Up Your Applications with Windows Workflow Foundation 4 by Matt Winkler in 515A on Wednesday at 2:00 PM

Discover how your applications can achieve a new degree of flexibility, transparency, and end-user control with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Expose tailored, productive authoring experiences for your users to define business and application logic with new capabilities in WF 4, including simplified designer rehosting and enhanced activity and designer programming models to create domain-specific libraries of activities. Understand the options available for hosting WF and extending the runtime to add control and application visibility and see how customers are already workflow-enabling their solutions with WF 4.

Windows Workflow Foundation 4 from the Inside Out by Bob Schmidt in 515A on Wednesday at 3:15 PM

See why Windows Workflow Foundation 4 is a powerful platform for simplifying application coordination logic and state management. Learn about the core runtime abstractions and under-the-hood improvements related to areas such as performance, transactions, and persistence. Get insights and techniques that enhance your investments in Workflow.

Workflow Services and “Dublin” by Mark Fussell in Petree Hall D on Thursday at 11:30 AM

Learn how to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 4, and “Dublin” to build and manage scalable, reliable, and highly-available applications. Discover the power of WF to build and coordinate WCF services and implement logic on the middle tier. Enable sophisticated messaging patterns with correlation, enhanced transaction support, durable services, and config-based activation. Learn how "Dublin" makes it easier to deploy, manage, and monitor WCF and WF applications.

Application Server Extensibility with Microsoft Project Code Name “Dublin” and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 by Nicholas Allen in Petree Hall D on Thursday at 1:45 PM

.NET 4 and “Dublin” provide new application hosting, tracking, and persistence capabilities. Learn the benefits of different hosting options and how to choose the right option for your scenario. Learn about custom tracking providers and how the built-in tracking system can be extended to meet your custom business data monitoring requirements. Learn about the new subsystem for managing durable application state using Microsoft SQL Server or custom application-specific stores.

PDC 2009 Logistics

Here is how next week is going to work for articles while PDC is going on. I will try to continue to have things appear at the usual time in the morning although some days you may get things at a later time.

On Monday I'll give a final rundown of related sessions for the framework talks.

My talk is on Thursday. If there's any content or resources that I need to post afterwards from the talk, those will probably go up Friday. I'm hoping for a similar type of arrangement as last year where MSDN takes care of putting out slides and videos so that I don't have to.

In between I'll be doing session reviews for the small number of sessions that I'll get to see. This is usually somewhere between three and five for a conference of this length. You can look at some examples of reviews from PDC last year.

Bob Muglia Talks Distributed Systems and Silverlight

TechCrunch talked to Bob Muglia a few months ago covering cloud computing, distributed systems, and Silverlight programming. Bob is the president of the Server and Tools business here at Microsoft that produces all of these technologies. There's a long transcript available for the whole piece with a twenty minute video covering the second half of the interview. You can also just jump directly into the video without needing the context from the first half. There have been a few updates since the video was taken as it is a few months old, but you should recognize the few of these such as Silverlight 3 being released.

Interfaces Lack Data

Why does having two known types blow up for being conflicting data contract types if the types are two different interfaces?

An interface only contains declarations for its members. The interface doesn't contain any data fields and any implementation for the interface is located in the class that implements the interface.

When you try to serialize an interface type, any concrete class might walk up having implemented the interface. That concrete class might be holding any kind of data or none at all. Essentially, this makes an interface type no different than the type Object (or in the schema world, the type Any). In fact, that's exactly what the interface is as far as the serializer is concerned. If you have two interfaces, they're both equivalent to Object, which means they will conflict.

The only caveat there is that an interface type for one of the known collection types will turn into the corresponding concrete type for that collection type. It's still easy to get yourself into trouble with collections but at least it only affects pairs of types that are at least superficially similar.

Another .Net 4 Survey: Documentation

If you enjoy being surveyed (and who doesn't?), then the developer documentation teams would like to better understand how you use the help and documentation libraries, and also what you'd like to see improved. The survey covers what versions of Visual Studio and .Net framework you use, how you go about finding things in the documentation, and how you'd like to have the documentation organized.

If you've only got time to fill out one survey though, I'm personally partial to the .Net 4 Beta 2 survey I posted last week for the Visual Studio team.