The .NET Endpoint : Articles

The New Dev Center Experience – MSDN Articles

Cliff Simpkins — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:56:10 GMT

This is the second part in the series of new things that are afoot with the MSDN websites. In this posting, I would like to discuss some changes in the posting of articles and code samples. As an example of the new experience, I’d like to draw attention to a refreshed article that was recently updated and reposted from Morgan Skinner, ‘Creating a Custom WF Activity.’

In the prior years, we made extensive use of the MSDN Online Library. Information on the MSDN Online Library takes one of two forms. There is the documentation that is written by the product group, which is typically posted under the WF 3.5 documentation node and WCF 3.5 documentation node of the taxonomy tree. There is also the whitepapers that were created outside of the product group – be that folks from the field, Microsoft Consultants, or external MVPs; these typically were posted in the ‘Articles and Overviews’ nodes (one for WCF Articles and Overviews, and one for WF Articles and Overviews) of the taxonomy tree.

Whitepaper Articles

Posting the whitepapers into the MSDN Online Library provided a series of benefits – including the inclusion in the installable documentation and consistency of the MTPS (MSDN & TechNet Publishing System); it also had drawbacks, primarily around flexibility, formatting, and discoverability. A major complaint that has come up about the way we’ve been doing things is that it makes it very hard to find new content that has been published into the system…which is a fair argument - the system has been well designed as a online version of an installed documentation library; it just wasn’t designed for the casual reader to regularly drop in and look for updates.

With the new MSDN Social Content servers, we now additional flexibility. Articles get the benefit of HTML (and are limited more by the CSS and ASP.NET template structure, rather than being limited to a handful of standard HTML tags).

Because of this, we’re trying to make articles posted to the new system a bit more interactive and easier to explore and relate to one another. To the right is a screenshot of Morgan’s article. I’ve called out a few of the new features, that I’m hoping help the reader get a better experience. There will likely be a few changes to the layout over the next couple weeks as we publish a few more articles up to the server and get a feel for what works (and what doesn’t), and based on community feedback (if you have feedback – as always – either post a comment below or use the contact link to the right to send us an e-mail).

In addition to the tagging capabilities (covered in my prior post on the new MSDN Dev Center pages), you’ll notice that we have created a grey ‘About this Article’ box. I know grey isn’t all that inspiring, but we did it to be consistent with the MSDN Online Library ‘This relates to version…’ box, and it’s flexible – let me know if you feel strongly about it. Within this box, we try to provide a list of the related technologies, a link to related downloads and related articles, and a mini table of contents to let users jump to the section of the article they may be most interested in. Additionally, we’ve moved the ‘About the Author’ up from the bottom to the right column.

Code Samples

For code samples, there really wasn’t a convenient place to put them. As a result, many of the code samples were posted up to the Microsoft.com Downloads website. Because of this limitation, the NetFX team had created the NetFX3.com website to host code samples. With the new MSDN platform, we now have two repositories for code samples and sample applications:

CodePlex: CodePlex is Microsoft’s server for hosting open source projects. Projects hosted in the CodePlex environment can be both Microsoft sponsored, as well as community led/owned – and include a TFS backend, an integrated issue tracking database, and discussion boards for hosted projects. A few of the notable Microsoft-sponsored projects on CodePlex that stand out for me include AAA, BBB, and CCC.
MSDN Code Gallery: The MSDN Code Gallery can be thought of as a place to post sample code and articles that involve Microsoft technologies. I believe that it is powered by the same engine as CodePlex, but isn’t intended for team-based development collaboration (Code Gallery doesn’t have the TFS backend for source control and issue tracking).

In the case of Morgan’s article, the source code has been posted up to the MSDN Code Gallery (screen shot of the Code Gallery page to the left). Posting the article via this method has many advantages over the prior method. Primary above them is the inclusion of the author in the project. In this project’s case, Morgan is co-owner of the Code Sample project, and can update the code sample as needed. As well, the author (and the MSDN Dev Center team – us) have the ability to update the project’s wiki page to point to relevant MSDN Forum posts and additional nuggets of wisdom that the community contribute to the project over its lifetime.

We’re hoping that this provides better context to those who come to the project years after it has been posted, allowing them to learn from those who came before them and hopefully not get frustrated with any issues in future service packs or DLL updates (should they occur; although we all know that code samples are perfect and never have quirks ^_^ ).

Over the coming months and years, expect to see WF and WCF projects showing up in these two repositories. We will make announcements on here and on the MSDN Dev Centers, and – as always – are interested in your opinions on what works and what doesn’t.

I hope you enjoy the new additions to the MSDN Dev Center family; happy reading – and happy coding!

Weekly Update - New REST and 'Oslo' Screencasts

Cliff Simpkins — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:34:09 GMT

I had originally used the title 'This week in downloads'...well, because there were downloads. :) But this feels a bit like hollow advertising, and I may shop around for a new title (suggestions are always welcome), but I'll go with the very bland 'Weekly Update' title for now.

New to the web this past week:

WCF Dev Series: New Screencast on Configuring Services with Endpoints
Rob Bagby: Rob posted a couple new screencasts on using WCF to enable HI-REST style scenarios

Ron Jacobs: Ron posted a couple interviews recorded at TechEd in June

Otherwise, we are continuing to focus on building out materials that will be appearing in the month of September - new MSDN pages, new articles, and a couple virtual labs.

This Week in Downloads

Cliff Simpkins — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:07:00 GMT

New to the web this week on the WF/WCF front:

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (BTW - it shipped! ^_^ )
.NET Framework 3.5 SP1
MSDN Library - WF Tutorials section is fixed!
PluralSight: WF/WCF Screencast: Creating your first WCF Service
Matt Winkler: Advanced WF Services (Part 4/4) - Conversations Patterns

Compared to other weeks in the past month, this has been a relatively quiet one on the publication front. There are a lot of really cool things being brought into the pipeline, especially for around the PDC timeframe.

Also, we have additional functionality coming to MSDN in the coming month. You may have already noticed that the MSDN servers are starting to become more community focused (including the new forums site and the MSDN bookmarks site and the green 'Community Content' sections that appears on the bottom of MSDN documentation). We've been working with the MSDN team to get new content for WF and WCF content to go onto the new service at launch; I'll be interested in your feedback. The initial pages at creation is to place up about four or five initial pages that provide an inventory/collection of videos/screencasts and code samples that are out there. We are also thinking about creating a 'Learning Roadmap' to help those new to the technologies get a grasp on where to start and some help with understanding what's out there today. But - as I said - thoughts/opinions/comments are welcome.

I apologize for the tardiness in getting this posting up. I typically work on these either Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, but it was a busy week in the office and I got drawn into writing my first Windows Mobile application over the weekend (a simple flash card program to help me learn the notes on the grand staff).

This Week in Downloads - WF & Services

Cliff Simpkins — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 04:01:00 GMT

Welcome to this week's installment of my weekly document and download roundup. Even though I was in Chicago for most of last week, this week sees a couple additional WF articles posted, and a few releases by Microsoft folks around Connected Systems technologies.

Michele Leroux Bustamante (MSDN Online): WF Deployment Scenarios Paper

Patterns & Practices Group: Improving Web Services Security (WCF Security Guide)
Matt Winkler (Blog): Demos from his Advanced Workflow Services TR7 talk

Matt Milner (MSDN Magazine) - Workflow Tips & Tricks
Ron Jacobs (endpoint.tv) - Bob Familiar chats with Ron, discussing REST & SOAP

Michele's WF Deployment Scenarios Paper
We've published a couple more sections of Michele's WF Deployment Scenario Guidance whitepaper. The publication of these two sections brings us up to four of the five articles now live in the MSDN WF Whitepapers & Articles section.

Upcoming this Week
We have a new weekly series starting up on Wednesday that I'm excited about. I hope to see you again in a few days, to learn about it.

This Week in Downloads - New WF Articles

Cliff Simpkins — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:34:00 GMT

This week, we've added two new articles for WF to the MSDN Online Library: an article by Jon Flanders to help choose between sequential workflows and state machines, and a major article by Michele Leroux Bustamante explaining the five most common WF deployment scenarios. Both articles have received great reviews from internal readers so far; and we're hoping that you find them useful as well.

Additionally, we wanted to draw attention to someting we missed last week; Maurice de Beijer published an article last week on using the new WCF activities in WF 3.5 to connect your workflows to web services.

Jon Flanders: How to Choose a Workflow
Jon's article on choosing between sequential workflows and state machines started out as a revisit to a topic that was touched on back in late 2005 by bloggers such as Dave Green and Ariel Schapiro, but hasn't seen much proscriptive guidance since then. The question of which workflow model to choose has always been a common one; the other most common one is asking about the difference between WF and BizTalk. Jon's article tries to explain the differences between the model and walk the reader through an implementation to help explain the decision factors.

We're hoping that this article serves as a spark to reinvigorate the topic, and look at process patterns that may best fit one model or the other.

Michele Leroux Bustamante: WF Scenarios
Michele's WF deployment scenario series explores the five general workflow scenarios that customers are using WF for today. Each section explores the benefits and limitations of WF within its scenario, and some best practices for implementation.

The article originally started out with the intention of being one paper to help explain where WF can be useful, but the overall paper quickly grew in size and scope as the sections grew, each telling a story of its own. As a result, we've split the paper out into an introduction and five articles to help make it less intimidating in size, and hopefully making it more accessible to folks.

This week, we publish the first two of the five sections: Human Workflows and SharePoint Workflows. The remaining three sections (Workflow Services, Rehosted Workflows, and Presentation Flow Coordination) will be published over the next few weeks, but we wanted to get these gems up here for your reading pleasure.

Maurice de Beijer: Using WCF with WF in .NET 3.5
Maurice published part 1 of his new article on using WCF with WF up to the MSDN. The article walks the reader through how to connect your workflows up to web services - in this case, he's WCF within the workflow to talk to either another WCF service endpoint, or an existing ASMX web service endpoint.

WF/WCF Articles in Vista Section
In addition to the new content, we looked into moving WF and WCF articles out of the Windows Vista and General .NET Programming branches of MSDN Library into the WF and WCF branches. We had been asked why some of these gems were scattered among the MSDN Library nodes, and the answer has to do with the long story of WinFX, and it's timing with the Vista launch. Unfortunately, we are unable to move the articles. The details of why are messy and get quite technical, but it's beyond our reach at the moment.

To help the articles with being found, we'll to create a 'library list' of sorts to help aide in discovery of articles, videos, and code samples. The new pages will be launched in August - either as subpage here or on the Dev Centers. There's a general question of what to do with the outdated content (some of the really top-notch articles that detail WinFX beta releases), and suggestions/comments are welcome. For the moment, we've been placing articles into the WF Articles and Overviews section.

Edit - Jul-28-2008 - 6.19pm PDT - Added a link to Jon's article.