The .NET Endpoint : Samples

WCF Interoperability Highlighted at PDC and ApacheCon

KentBrown — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:12:52 GMT

At PDC this week we had a booth to showcase the interoperability that WCF gives you through its support for the WS-* protocols. In particular, we highlighted an Apache incubator project called Stonehenge.

At Stonehenge we work together with a growing list of WS-* vendors (WSO2, Sun, SpringSource, and soon Progress) to build samples and prove out interoperability between the stacks.

At the PDC booth we had a demo of the soon to be released ’M2’ version of the StockTrader Sample application. Check out the Channel 9 video here.

We also talked about Stonehenge at the ApachecCon conference in Oakland a couple of weeks ago where Apache celebrated their 10 year anniversary. If you are in the mood for some geek entertainment you might want to see this from the Lightening Talks.

If you are doing cross-platform interop with WCF, I would encourage you to get involved in Stonehenge. You can contribute by suggesting important test scenarios and/or helping build and test one of the samples. To get started go to the project wiki: Apache Stonehenge and subscribe to the dev email list.

To learn about other interop activities at PDC check out the Interoperability Team Blog.

Migration Guidance for the WF Developer (Beta 1 - Part 2)

Cliff Simpkins — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:41:46 GMT

About six weeks ago, the WF team published up the first four WF3->WF4 migration guidance documents, aimed at helping WF developers prepare and think about the new WF object model runtime.

Today, we published the next three documents in the series to the WF4 Migration Guidance document set. With today’s release, we begin moving from the general guidance and start to present cookbook material, addressing more specific scenarios and presenting code.

WF Migration Overview (Already Live)
Overview of the document collection and an initial starting place for the WF3 developer
WF Migration: Best Practices for WF3 Development (Already Live)
How to design WF3 artifacts so they are more easily migratable to WF4
WF Guidance: Rules (Already Live)
Discussion of how to bring rules-related investments forward into .NET 4
WF Guidance: State Machine (Already Live)
Discussion of WF4 control flow modeling in the absence of a StateMachine activity
WF Migration Cookbook: Custom Activities (Now Live!)
Examples and instructions for redesigning WF3 custom activities on WF4
WF Migration Cookbook: Workflows (Now Live!)
Examples and instructions for redesigning WF3 workflows on WF4
WF Migration Cookbook: Workflow Services (Now Live!)
Examples and instructions for redesigning WF3 workflow services on WF4
WF Migration Cookbook: Advanced Custom Activities (Coming Soon)
Examples and instructions for redesigning advanced WF3 custom activities on WF4

As I mentioned in the last post about the documents, these documents are initial draft releases that the team is releasing to you. For these, they are all written for the object model and features that are part of Beta 1. We will be updating the documents as additional releases of .NET 4 are publicly released, and the documents will address further scenarios with each release.

Also – again – the team will be supporting feedback and requests for the documents and accompanying sample code in the WF 4 forum on MSDN.

Happy reading!
Cliff

Litware Training sample Mashup app

KentBrown — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:20:09 GMT

We've all heard of a "mashup" because its one of those buzz words, like "Web 2.0", that is picked up and repeated over and over again by the journalists and analysts. But have you actually seen one up close in the wild? Or do you have suspicions that its an elusive beast or a myth like Big Foot or Nessie? Well, we've got one of these critters in captivity for you to take home as a pet. Play with it. Get comfortable. See what makes it tick. See what tools from Microsoft are useful in building a mashup. And see if this programming style applies to something you want to do with your next application.

Litware Training is a sample "mashup" app built using ASP.NET and the WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2. It demonstrates how to build a Web 2.0 application, tapping into popular search, geographic information, and social networking APIs on the internet. It shows how to consume and expose RESTful services.

Thanks to Ben Dewey of twentysix New York who built the sample.

Migration Guidance for the WF Developer

Cliff Simpkins — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:32:10 GMT

This morning, I’m pleased to announce that the team has posted four initial Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) migration guidance documents to help current WF developers evaluate the new WF programming model that is being introduced in .NET Framework 4.

The documents were written by the PM team to help describe the relationship between the existing WF technology that was introduced in .NET 3.0 (defined as the types in the System.Workflow.* namespaces; referred to in the documents as WF3 for simplicity and brevity) and the new WF technology that is being released in .NET 4 (the System.Activities.* namespaces; referred to in the documents as WF4). The team explains how to think of WF features within the two programming models, and the choices you have as a user or a potential user of workflow technology in .NET 4.

Because this is a very broad topic, we’ve broken up what was initially going to be a single paper into about eight. There is an overview document and [currently] seven papers that take the form of either higher level guidance and cookbook papers. Today’s initial release introduces the higher-level guidance documents, with the cookbooks to be released in the coming weeks.

As the documents are updated, we will be releasing them to the WF Migration Guidance download on the MS Download Center, and the accompanying source code will be posted on a WF Migration Guidance project on the MSDN Code Gallery.

The document list looks like the following:

WF Migration Overview (Now Live!)
Overview of the document collection and an initial starting place for the WF3 developer
WF Migration: Best Practices for WF3 Development (Now Live!)
How to design WF3 artifacts so they are more easily migratable to WF4
WF Guidance: Rules (Now Live!)
Discussion of how to bring rules-related investments forward into .NET 4
WF Guidance: State Machine (Now Live!)
Discussion of WF4 control flow modeling in the absence of a StateMachine activity
WF Migration Cookbook: Custom Activities (Coming Soon)
Examples and instructions for redesigning WF3 custom activities on WF4
WF Migration Cookbook: Workflows (Coming Soon)
Examples and instructions for redesigning WF3 workflows on WF4
WF Migration Cookbook: Workflow Services (Coming Soon)
Examples and instructions for redesigning WF3 workflow services on WF4
WF Migration Cookbook: Advanced Custom Activities (Coming Soon)
Examples and instructions for redesigning advanced WF3 custom activities on WF4

The papers will continue to be grown and updated as we move towards the RTM release – to address a larger number of usage scenarios, and to address any changes that happen between pre-releases. We’ve been working on the documents over the last month, and think that they provide some good initial thoughts on how to approach the technology; and we hope that you find them helpful

The team will be supporting feedback and requests for the documents and accompanying sample code in the WF 4 forum on MSDN. I’m told the feature PMs will be creating a thread for each document to make it easier to provide feedback and for the PMs to respond – we should have more information on that in the next few days.

Newly Posted - WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2

Cliff Simpkins — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:01:00 GMT

Happy Thursday everyone,

Earlier this afternoon, the WCF REST team released the second preview release of the WCF REST Starter Kit onto CodePlex. Today's release adds new client capabilities that we think should really make client-side REST development easier. Chief among the new functionality included in Preview 2 is a new class that provides a staged pipeline model for requesting resources over the web. Using this new HTTP client class allows the developer to plug into the various stages of communication to handle custom authentication, caching, and fault handling outside of the client's application logic.

For those new to the WCF REST Starter Kit - it's a collection of preview functionality that makes use of WCF to implement REST architectural patterns. The kit includes new features, Visual Studio templates, samples and guidance that enable users to create REST style services using WCF. The goal of the kit is to provide a toolset that simplifies building RESTful services today, and to get feedback from you on the features provided in the WCF REST Starter Kit - feedback that will shape future REST capabilities in WCF, in .NET 4 and beyond.

The initial release of the WCF REST Starter Kit (in October, 2008) focused on building server-side REST services, with a heavy focus on the Visual Studio project templates that help developers get a jump start developing in a RESTful manner. Since the October release, the team has received some excellent feedback and added a few additional team members, Ron Jacobs (the top evangelist around all things Workflow and WCF) has created a few hands on labs, and Aaron Skonnard has done a few screencasts for the kit.

With the release of these new bits, it's my pleasure to also announce the following:

Updated REST in WCF Dev Center on MSDN: The MSDN Dev Center for REST in WCF has been updated to account for the wider topic of REST in WCF, rather than purely focusing on the REST Starter Kit. In the coming weeks, we will be adding blog feeds to the site (similar to the parent WCF Dev Center).
Updated Hands On Labs: Ron has updated his WCF REST hands on labs, which contains labs that cover both REST development using WCF in .NET 3.5 SP1, as well as developing using the WCF REST Starter Kit. The labs provide an excellent guided tour for the newbie in all of us.
New WCF REST Sample Application: The product management crew here has been working to develop a sample application that demonstrates how to make use of the WCF REST Starter Kit on the client and server to create a training portal. The application is pretty sweet, and we look forward to sharing more information about this in the coming week.
New Screencasts: We've also been working with Aaron to get some new screencasts on the new features in the new preview of the WCF REST Starter Kit. The new screencasts should start landing onto the Endpoint show on Channel9 in the coming week.

We're hoping that you download the latest preview release and give it a try. Feel free to drop into the WCF REST Starter Kit forum over on the ASP.NET site and give us feedback. The team is on the forum daily, and is using the feedback to tweak and improve the features and functionality.

This Week in Downloads - Events

Cliff Simpkins — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

This week had a few videos and a new article go up to MSDN this week:

The TechEd Online videos were recorded at the TechEd 2008 Developer Conference [North America] in June. The first two videos were interviews done by Ron in the TechEd fish bowl, and the third was done by Rob Bagby.

The deck and demo come from a talk this week done by Kirk Evans. This week, at the Microsoft TechReady conference, Kirk did a chalk-talk discussing patterns that typically come up within WF scenarios. The scenarios were well received, attendees of the chalk talk scored it well, and I thought it was a great idea for a chalk talk. And, everyone thought it was a grand idea for Kirk to post it up on his blog and share it with the world. :)

Additional Web Items of Note
The Windows SDK team posted a couple surveys, and they're looking for customer input on SDK improvements/changes - and how it interfaces with Visual Studio.

The two surveys that they're looking for input on are:

To close on a down note, we missed getting the third installment in Michele's WF Deployment Scenarios series - Workflow Services - posted up this week. It's done and edited, but Friday afternoon isn't the best time to try and move an article through the MSDN publication process. Look for it to show up on the site early next week.

This Week in Downloads

Cliff Simpkins — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the first installment of a weekly post to outline updates and changes in the world of WF and WCF materials. As I said in my apologetic post yesterday, most of the updates are in a holding pattern this week, so it's been a quiet one. But I did want to mention two updates that went live this week:

The .NET StockTrader application 2.01 update
Refresh of the WF Connect Site and the WCF Connect Site

.NET StockTrader 2.01
A couple days ago, Greg Leake posted up a update to his .NET StockTrader application. The application that originally started out to show off .NET and Java interoperability and to compare performance has been much more in the 2.0 release, adding in tools and best practices that can be used with your own WCF applications, including the new WCF Configuration Service.

More information about the 2.01 release can be found on the .NET StockTrader MSDN web page, on the .NET StockTrader forum, or you can download version 2.01 directly.

Connect Sites
For those unfamiliar, the Connect sites are the best place for submitting bugs and suggestions to the Connected Framework product team. While not the best support location (the forums are your best bet for getting support - in addition to the product group monitoring the forums, you get the large community of users for assistance), it is a great way to provide input on what you think should be done with the technologies.

Download Posted - WF XAML Workshop

Cliff Simpkins — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:00:25 GMT

We posted up a new Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) workshop to the Downloads server. The WF XAML Workflow Workshop was created by Steve Danielson to help developers better understand the development of XAML workflows.

The topic of XAML Workflows is a popular one with customers, but there are some common questions about the best way to create and use XAML-only Workflows. This workshop illustrates several XAML Workflow topics to help WF developers better understand this topic.

Topics covered in this workshop include:

Different modes of Workflow authoring
Host considerations
XAML activation
Workflow compiler
Versioning and deployment
Dynamic update
Security considerations

The lab is available on downloads section of Microsoft.com. Two MSI files are posted for download, one containing the code and the PowerPoint presentation, and the a second MSI containing the video file. Additionally, you can view the workshop presentation on the MSDN media server (I promise to figure out how to embed WMV files in future posts).