Nicholas Allen's Indigo Blog

Watch the PDC 2009 Keynotes

Nicholas Allen — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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

Nicholas Allen — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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

Nicholas Allen — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:30:00 GMT

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

Nicholas Allen — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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

Nicholas Allen — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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

Nicholas Allen — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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

Nicholas Allen — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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

Nicholas Allen — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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

Nicholas Allen — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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.

One Week to PDC 2009

Nicholas Allen — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

With one week to go before PDC starts, the times and rooms for all of the sessions are now available. While things are still subject to change, now would be a good time to make a preliminary plan for your week if you're going to be attending PDC.

My talk this year is currently scheduled for 1:45 Thursday in Petree Hall D. For those that have attended prior PDCs in Los Angeles, the Petree Hall rooms are the large theaters in the west wing. Depending on how many people show up I may have to retarget some of the content to reflect a broader audience (capacity of the room is about 1100). I build in a lot of flexibility when I talk though to make these types of adjustments.

Here's what I'm planning to cover on the topic of application server extensibility in only 60 minutes (note that I'm jumping in to give a workflow talk; Ed Pinto will be delivering the session on WCF this year):

Understanding the application server and workflow architecture (just enough to get you through the talk)
Hosting options for workflow, including building your own application host
How and why we built a new model for persisting durable services
Customizing how instance persistence works, from tweaking how a variable is recorded all the way to building an entirely new instance store
How workflow execution is tracked
Customizing what events get tracked and where the data gets recorded

Workflow persistence has completely changed from past versions starting in .Net 4 Beta 2 and this will probably be your only chance to get a detailed explanation before the release.

.Net Services November 2009 CTP

Nicholas Allen — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

The .Net Services team has made a November 2009 CTP release of the SDK for their portion of the Azure Services Platform. As mentioned over the summer, .Net Services has pared down their work on routers, queues, and relays to focus on delivering the access control service and service bus. These two services are also what the team will be focusing on at PDC.

The service bus is an infrastructure piece for connecting together different components in a distributed application. The access control service, now more oriented around REST, allows integration of those connected components with identity providers. Both services have changed quite a bit as described by the breaking changes list from the previous CTP.

The announcement for the CTP also covers how the transition from a beta product to a production service will take place.

Windows Web Services Samples

Nicholas Allen — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

The Windows Web Services API is a native-code implementation of a subset of the SOAP web services support in WCF. This makes Windows Web Services useful when you want to build web services but need to use C or C++ instead of managed code and need to have a minimal set of dependencies.

Many of the people on the Windows Web Services team worked on Indigo before splitting off after our first release. This means that you'll see a lot of similar names and concepts between the two even though their intended users can be quite different.

I've had a few people ask what using Windows Web Services is like and personally I think that looking at examples is a good way to find out. Windows Web Services has an excellent set of samples including a nicely organized index of examples. I'd recommend browsing through the list there starting from the service model examples and then moving to some of the deeper topics.

Breaking Changes for WCF in .Net 4 Beta 2

Nicholas Allen — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Available for download is the list of breaking changes between beta 1 and beta 2 for WCF and WF. To save you some time, here's my condensed version of the list.

When adding site or machine-level collections of behaviors, those behaviors will be merged with service-level behavior configurations of the same name. Previously, you would only get the behaviors configured directly by the application if there was a naming conflict.
The blob encoder was renamed to the byte stream encoder. It still works the same though. Put some bytes in one end and the exact same bytes come out the other end.
The local "in app domain" transport channel was removed. Use named pipes instead; they're just as fast and have been available for years.
A security feature involving SAML tokens that you've probably never heard of has very slightly changed its default behavior.

Visual Studio and .Net 4 Beta 2 Survey

Nicholas Allen — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

The Visual Studio team has set up a survey to collect additional feedback about the Beta 2 release. If you have something to say but haven't reported it on the Connect site or through other feedback channels, this would be a good opportunity to let your thoughts be known. The window of opportunity for actually addressing the feedback in this release is closing pretty rapidly.

The survey is about ten questions long and mostly along these lines:

How are you using the Visual Studio beta?
Have you encountered any weird behaviors?
Is the performance good?

You should be able to fill it out and add your own comments in less than five minutes.

Replacing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 with Beta 2

Nicholas Allen — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

I recently helped someone out with replacing Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4 Beta 1 with the newer Beta 2 release. Here are a few things that I had to learn along the way.

I've done enough beta installations to know that having previous versions of the same release will cause endless headaches. I don't even try to install over top of a beta installation first to see if it will work. The Beta 2 release notes for Visual Studio 2010 lead off with a known issue that trying to install Beta 2 without uninstalling Beta 1 first will fail.

Unfortunately, uninstalling Beta 1 wasn't successful as the installer would ask for the setup location for the TFS Object Model and then crash. I found the solution to that in the Beta 2 installation addendum. Before uninstalling the main Visual Studio 2010 program, uninstall Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1 Object Model. This ran to completion and stopped the crashing in the Visual Studio uninstaller. It looks like you only need to worry about this component if you had installed Visual Studio Team Suite.

After uninstalling Visual Studio, this left a few Beta 1 components behind. Here's the order that worked for me:

Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Extended Beta 1
Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile Beta 1
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Beta 1 Redistributable x64
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Beta 1 Redistributable x86

At that point the system was clean and installing Beta 2 of Visual Studio and .Net 4 worked on the first try.