The .NET Endpoint : WCF

Hosting Enhancements in .NET4 and Windows Server AppFabric

AppFabric Team — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:41:00 GMT

This blog post drills down on the various hosting capabilities of WCF and WF in .NET 4 and for Window Server AppFabric as introduced in in the Introduction to AppFabric blog entry.

When referring to hosting, I am discussing the features of the “application environment”, which enables execution and management of the applications.

The .NET 4 for WCF Web services one focus was on making the application easier to configure and manage. For Workflow (WF) Web services, we integrated the “application environment” with WAS (Windows Process Activation Service) so that you could deploy, execute and manage WF services.

Windows Server AppFabric extends the WAS “application environment” to provide two additional hosting capabilities, namely “Always Running” and “Scheduled Start”.

I will describe these hosting features in detail in this post, so let’s start with the improvements in .NET 4.

.NET 4 Hosting Enhancements

1) Config Based Activation (CBA):

Today when hosting web applications containing services, you need to deploy an additional “.svc” file, describing metadata and information about the services. When organizations/applications have large number of services, there is an inherit explosion of files causing a management overhead. To address this problem, we introduced the config based activation feature which allows registration of the services in the web.config files, eliminating the need for a .svc file.

How-To:

a. Add the service registration to the web.config file of your web application.

In the example below, we register two services, the CreditCheckService and the PaymentService. In addition the Payment/PaymentService.svc specifies a customfactory that can be used for activation.

<system.serviceModel>

</serviceActivations>

</serviceHostingEnvironment>

</system.serviceModel>

Note: You have the option of using either Service Config Editor or Visual Studio Intellisense to configure the application.

More details about this feature can be found here;

· http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee358764(VS.100).aspx

· http://blogs.msdn.com/rampo/archive/2009/10/27/activation-without-svc-files-config-based-activation-cba.aspx

2) Support Multiple Site Bindings:

Many hosters and organizations host their web application over multiple ports and hostnames. This makes their service accessible over multiple addresses. For example the following addresses resolve to the same service.

www.store.com

store.com

www.store.com:80

www.store.com:90

The URLs above require specifying multiple site bindings in IIS. Lack of this support for this feature in the WCF runtime was an adoption blocker in the 3.0 release of the .NET framework. In .NET 3.5, we made some incremental improvements through baseAddressPrefixFilters. In .NET 4, we have addressed more of this feature, which has significantly eased the shared hosting deployment issues.

How-To:

a. Configure Site: Configure IIS site binding with the required host headers.

b. Enable Application: Configure the application web.config file to enable multiple site bindings. See example below.

<system.serviceModel>

<system.serviceModel>

Note: Only multiple of http/https site bindings are supported. i.e. TCP and other protocols are not currently supported

More details about this feature can be found here;

· http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee358763(VS.100).aspx

· http://blogs.msdn.com/rampo/archive/2008/02/11/how-can-wcf-support-multiple-iis-binding-specified-per-site.aspx

3) Enable Extension-less URLs

There are scenarios when you might want to deploy your web service without extensions in the URL say for example, a WCF REST RSS service deployed with these URL

http:://www.store.com/products/

http://www.store.com/Movies

We leveraged System.Web.Routing feature and added a new System.ServiceModel.Activation.ServiceRoute API to enable the registration of WCF services. This enabled us to extend an API customers were already familiar with it to WCF Services.

How-To:

The example below enables activation of a WCF REST service over the URI http://www.store.com/movies

a. Enable runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests

Add the following configuration to the application web.config file. Note: the Visual Studio web application template includes this by default.

b. Register the Route Handler/Module

<add name="UrlRoutingModule"

type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule,

System.Web.Routing, Version=4.0.0.0,

Culture=neutral,

PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />

</modules>

<add name="UrlRoutingHandler"

preCondition="integratedMode"

verb="*" path="UrlRouting.axd"

type="System.Web.HttpForbiddenHandler,

System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,

PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />

</handlers>

c. Register the service either in global.asax or AppInitiate() method deployed to App_Code directory.

protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)

{ RouteTable.Routes.Add(new ServiceRoute("movies", new WebServiceHostFactory(), typeof(Movies)));

}

More details about this feature can be found here –

· http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee358764(VS.100).aspx

4) Workflow in WAS

As part of providing the “application environment” for WF, we enabled

1) Activation of declarative .xamlx Workflows when deploy to WAS

2) Continued execution by identifing instance performing work and reporting it to the hosting environment. This ensures that the host process is not un-necessarily recycled.

How-To:

Use the WCF workflow Service Application template to develop WF application to be hosted in WAS/Windows Server AppFabric. These templates will generate .XAMLX resources which are directly hostable in WAS.

Note: if you have custom activities which need to be deployed along with the application, then they need to reference it in the system.web.compilation <assemblies> element.

Windows Server AppFabric Hosting

Now let’s look at the feature for Hosting that Windows Server AppFabric provides in addition to the .NET Framework.

5) Windows Server AppFabric Service Management Service

There are mainly two scenarios why we implemented the service Management Service in Dublin. They are:

A Batch processing

a. The scenario is that you want to batch process orders at off peak times or weekend. Typically this scenario is that a web application takes the order and puts it in the queue, and the orders are processed from at the end of the day when servers are typically otherwise idling.

B Support Windows Server AppFabric Workflow Management Service

b. The Workflow Management Service (WMS) is responsible for resuming “runnable” durable instances. See Introduction to AppFabric blog entry for details. This service uses the Service Management Service as a mechanism to start the WorkflowServiceHost. This is an implementation detail of the Windows Server AppFabric Workflow Management Service.

To support the above requirement there needed to be a protocol agnostic way to start a service and so we introduced the Windows Server AppFabric Service Management Service, which enables starting any service (registered with the application environment) within the application.

How-To

The first question to ask is “How do I address this service?” To demonstrate this with an example.

http://www.store.com/Services/dvd.svc/titleInfo

Above is a URI of a dvd.svc .Remember the fact that Service Management service is an independent service, which resides in every virtual application, and is capable of being activated over the named.pipe transport protocol.

It implements an IServiceManagement interface, which contains the ActivateService method, with one parameter the virtualPath.

Returning to our example, let’s say the above dvd.svc is deployed in the virtual application called “Services”.

To construct URI of the Service Management service

1) Replace the protocol the service URI with net.pipe

2) Replace the hostname with the appropriate host header specified in the site binding

3) Remove the relativeServicePath and append it rest of the path with /ServiceManagement.svc

So for this example, the Service Management Service can be specified with

net.pipe://localhost/Services/ServiceManagement.svc

Typically to start a service, you could envision a application which takes a service URI, calculates the SMS URI, and pings the application.

6) Autostart WCF/WF Services

One issue when hosting services in IIS is the “first message latency” message delay or the the requirement to “Warm-up” the application, in advance of the first message.

Autostart is a feature introduced in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 which allows you to achieve this. It provides “Warm-up” and the “Always Running” semantics. Additionally, It removes the need to write a WAS host aware transports, otherwise known as Listener Adapters.

You should use this feature for primarily two reasons

a. Reduce the latency incurred by the first message.

b. Hosting WCF transports/protocols for which there are no Listener Adapters. The trade-off is site density

This feature is supported only on the Win7 and Win2008 R2 platform.

How-To:

Windows Server AppFabric provides configuration support in IIS Manager to Autostart the application.

1. Navigate to the Application

2. Click on Configure in Actions pane

3. Configure the Application to either by choosing

a. Enabled which will autostart all the services

b. Custom option, which will autostart only the specific services.

To Autostart an individual service, you will need to navigate the configuration panel for that specific service.

To summarize, we made hosting investments , in both the framework and Windows Server AppFabric, primarily focusing on the following aspects

1) Easier WCF service configuration and management

2) Enable activation and execution of Worflow in WAS

3) Enhance the existing “application environment” capabilities in WAS by providing additional semantics like “Always Running” and “Scheduled Start” for web services.

Getting started with Windows Server AppFabric

AppFabric Team — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:40:00 GMT

In a previous post we introduced Windows Server AppFabric, a set of extensions to the Windows Application Server that “make it easier to build, scale and manage Web and composite applications that run on Internet Information Services (IIS).” AppFabric enhances the Application Server role in Windows by providing some features out of the box that customers previously have had to build by themselves. These include a scalable distributed cache and features for managing WCF and WF services. In this post I’m going to give you some tips for getting started with the service and workflow management features of AppFabric.

First, if you haven’t already done so, install AppFabric. You’ll find a pointer to the download page on the Windows Server AppFabric Development Center site. Keep this site handy. This is the main site for AppFabric and is where you will find the latest news as well as links to samples, tutorials, and the support forum.

Find the link to the download page on the Dev Center site. Follow that link and take a few minutes to download and read the installation guide and release notes. Install any prerequisite software and Windows hotfixes that you may be missing. The prereqs include .NET 4 Beta 2 and Windows PowerShell v2. If you’re running on Windows Vista SP2 or Windows Server 2008 SP2 you’ll need to uninstall PowerShell v1 and download and install v2. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 include PowerShell v2 by default. See the installation guide for details.

On the download page find the Setup package for your machine’s operating system and architecture, and run the Setup wizard. We’ll use only the service and workflow management features of AppFabric for now so we require only the Worker feature to be installed, but install and configure the distributed cache features if you will use those later.

The Dev Center site links to a tutorial that walks you through deploying, configuring, monitoring, and managing a WF service. The tutorial does a nice job introducing most of the service and workflow management features of AppFabric and is well worth the time to go through. The first version of the tutorial has you use the IIS Manager tools for the exercises, while the second version has you complete the tasks using PowerShell cmdlets and scripts. The tutorial comes with a sample application that you will deploy using the Web Deployment Tool. You’ll hear us highlight this tool quite a bit as we talk about managing IIS hosted services. The tool is powerful for synchronizing applications and IIS settings from one machine to another.

If you just want to see some of the features in action, though, you can create a simple workflow service project in Visual Studio 2010 and run it in IIS. Create a new project using the WCF Workflow Service Application template. This will give you a workflow service with a GetData operation that receives a message and sends a response. On the project properties, view the Web tab and configure the application to run in IIS instead of the Visual Studio Development Server. If you’re running Visual Studio elevated as an administrator and you have the IIS 6 Management Compatibility feature of IIS installed you can create a new virtual directory directly from the Web tab. Otherwise, use IIS Manager to create the virtual directory, pointing it to the root directory of your Visual Studio project. (This is where you’ll find the web.config and XAMLX files.)

Once you have your application running in IIS you can see and manage its services with AppFabric. Open IIS Manager and expand the tree. Click on the root node and find the Application Server Extensions for .NET 4 modules in the center features pane. With those modules you can view service activity on the Dashboard, view endpoints, and configure services. Go back to your project in Visual Studio and add a Delay activity at the end of your workflow to keep instances alive for a few minutes so you can watch them go from the Active to Idle states in the Persisted WF Instances section of the Dashboard and see the instances show up in the WF Instance History section as they complete.

AppFabric adds some powerful features to the Windows Application Server. Install the Beta 1 and go through the tutorials to learn about the features in depth, or try a simple scenario on your own to get familiar with the features. If you run into any problems or have feedback to share with us please do so in our forum or via our Connect page.

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.

The WCF services ecosystem

.NET Connected Framework Team — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:15:00 GMT

At PDC, Microsoft announced the rebranding of ADO.NET Data Services as WCF Data Services and of .NET RIA Services as WCF RIA Services. This is not just a product marketing decision – it is also a technical commitment to provide a coherent and unified services story on .NET.

The current implementations of ADO.NET Data Services (previously known as Codename ‘Astoria’) and .NET RIA Services (previously known as Codename ‘Alexandria’) are based on WCF. In fact, they are WCF services. Moving forward, future releases will align the technologies to allow features of the technologies to be used in a mix and match manner as appropriate. We are currently in early stages of investigation around potential areas of deeper integration such enabling WCF RIA services to support an appropriate subset of ADO.NET Data Service’s Open Data protocol (OData); enabling validation features that are currently only available in WCF RIA Services in other flavors of WCF services as well etc.

By unifying these services offerings on top of WCF, we are maximizing developer knowledge transfer and skill reuse in the short term and the long term. For the WCF RIA Services developer, the developer does not need to know all aspects of WCF to get their service up and running. However, if they want to add a WCF behavior or take advantage of the rich extensibility of WCF to their WCF RIA Service, they can choose to do so in a fashion that takes advantage of the unified communications programming model that is WCF.

Thus, as a result of this alignment, .NET will offer several different flavors of WCF services (listed below) that you can choose from based on your particular needs. The important thing to remember is these options will all build on the underlying WCF architecture. As such these are not binary choices – providing the .NET service developer with a choice among three different entry points into a single distributed programming framework, rather than a choice among three different programming options. We expect many applications will leverage multiple models for building out their applications and their developer's knowledge will easily transfer from one model to the other.

· WCF Core Services – Allows full flexibility for building operation-centric services. This includes industry standard interop, as well as channel and host plug-ability. Use this for operation-based services which need to do things such as interop with Java, be consumed by multiple clients, flow transactions, use message based security, perform advanced messaging patterns like duplex, use transports or channels in addition to HTTP, or host in processes outside of IIS.

· WCF WebHttp/AJAX Services – Is best when you are exposing operation-centric HTTP services to be deployed at web scale or are building a RESTful service and want full control over the URI/format/protocol.

· WCF Data Services – Including a rich implementation of OData for .NET, Data Services are best when you are exposing your data model and associated logic through a RESTful interface

· WCF Workflow Services – Is best for long running, durable operations or where the specification and enforcement of operation sequencing is important

· WCF RIA Services – is best for building an end-to-end Silverlight application

If you want to learn more about the different WCF services at PDC please check out the following sessions:

FT13 What’s New for Windows Communication Foundation
FT55 Developing REST Applications with the .NET Framework
CL06 Networking and Web Services in Silverlight
CL07 Mastering Microsoft .NET RIA Services
CL21 Building Amazing Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft .NET RIA Services
FT10 Evolving ADO.NET Entity Framework in .NET 4 and Beyond
FT12 ADO.NET Data Services: What’s new with the RESTful data services framework

Thanks, and looking forward to your feedback!

Developing and Managing Services with Windows Server AppFabric

Cliff Simpkins — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Today at PDC we are excited to introduce the Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1. AppFabric evolves the existing application server capabilities of Windows Server to make it easier to build, scale and manage Web and composite applications that run on Internet Information Services (IIS).

For Web applications, AppFabric provides caching capabilities to provide high-speed access, scale, and high availability to application data These capabilities are based on the technology previously code named “Velocity.”

For composite applications, AppFabric makes it easier to build and manage services built using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). These capabilities are based on the technology previously code named “Dublin.”

This first post provides an introduction to developing and managing WF services with AppFabric. Download the Beta 1 release at http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric.

Introduction to AppFabric

The benefits of having service-based applications, often referred to as SOA, to create systems based on autonomous services have been articulated in several MSDN articles. WCF is the technology that enables this, and in turn has been integrated with other Microsoft developer technologies such as ADO.NET Data Services, WCF rich Internet applications (RIA) services and WCF REST services. In .NET Framework 4, WCF has been deeply integrated with an improved WF runtime enabling you to build WCF services that are implemented with WF.

Whatever technology that you use to build and compose services together, you face challenges based on these questions:. “When building server applications what features of the platform can I take advantage of that light up my application and enable me to focus more on the business?” “Having built this application, where is the best place to test this, to run this in production, and how do I manage it?”

This post focuses on how Windows Server AppFabric, combined with the .NET Framework 4, addresses these challenges, with particular emphasis on WF services.

Developing WF Services

Depending on the architecture of your application, typically you build services focused on the middle tier. For example, ADO.NET Data Services are suited for the data access tier and can be composed together with other services in the middle tier. For an overview of WF services in .NET 4, read the Aaron’s overview of WCF in .NET 4 on MSDN. In the middle tier, WF services are an ideal technology, since they are strongly focused on using declarative approaches for composing services for your business. For additional reading on WCF Services, David Chappell’s ‘The Workflow Way’ provides an excellent introduction to the topic.

The key values that WF Services bring to service authoring are:

Long-running applications that wait for external input for activation such as messages, thereby using resources efficiently.
A single or sequential flow control programming model while handling the complexity of multiple async I/O calls. For example, by using a parallel activity in your WF Service you can coordinate multiple calls to other services allowing the WF runtime to take care of all the async message calls and marshaling the data back to your service.
Coordination of messages to workflow instances with the use of message correlation. WF Services in .NET Framework 4 provide content-based correlation that enables you to query the content of a message for unique information to identify the specific workflow instance the message relates to. This enables long-running scenarios being able to activate a specific workflow instance when clients send messages.
Consistent WCF and WF instrumentation integrated with Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). The WCF and WF runtimes now both emit ETW events for tracing and tracking to provide detailed monitoring and diagnostics. Using ETW provides greater performance, thereby having less impact on your applications.
An expressive set of workflow activities for authoring business process. Here the Flowchart activity is extremely powerful by enabling you to more closely match the typically graphical representation of a business process drawn using Visio, for example, with the implementation of the business in code using the Flowchart.
A simple extensibility model for workflow activities, enabling you to define your own library of business domain activities. These can be included into the Workflow Designer in Visual Studio 2010, enabling developers to more quickly build business WF services.

Hosting and Managing Services

Regardless of the technology used to build your service, where and how you run your services introduces a number of options. Today you can host your services in a process created by the Windows Process Activation service (WAS) in IIS, a Windows service or a self-hosted executable. This provides a mechanism for activating workflows, but is only one part of a broader hosting picture for providing a suitable environment to run your production applications. Typically there are other platform service requirements that as a developer you would like to take advantage of, such as application state storage (persistence), instrumentation for health monitoring, caching, and other capabilities that provide scalability and reliability to deployed applications. Windows Server as an application server today provides services you can take advantage of such as MSMQ for message queuing, and the event log for diagnostics.

Windows Server AppFabric builds on the application server capabilities in Windows Server to 1) host and manage your WCF and WF Services and 2) provide a distributed in-memory data cache. AppFabric provides a set of common services that your applications can take advantage of thereby allowing you as a developer to concentrate on building solutions that solve key business problems. These common services are focused on enhancing Windows Server’s WCF and WF Service hosting capabilities, and making it easier to manage these services. Additionally the distributed cache introduces rich scale-out capabilities for applications built using .NET Framework.

Persisting WF Services

The key scenarios this enables are;

Reliability – The ability to persist (save) workflow state and reliably resume workflow instances that have been idle for a defined time interval.
Availability – The recovery of saved workflow state when an application, process, or computer terminates unexpectedly.
Scalability – The ability to unload idle workflow instances from memory to efficiently use resources, the capability of retrying to load workflow instances when a message arrives on a different computer in the host farm, and gracefully handling retries when there is a lock on the instance.

Windows Server AppFabric provides a Windows service called the Workflow Management service (WMS) that manages instances in the persistence store. AppFabric can install a SQL Server persistence store for your WF Services which the WMS monitors to enable the scenarios above. AppFabric also supports other store solutions as well.

Monitoring

The key scenarios this enables are;

Health monitoring – How well is my app running? The ability to see expected healthy events occur within your service to know that it is still operational.
Troubleshooting – What has failed with my app? The ability to quickly diagnose failures within your service and either correct these or provide a developer with further detailed information.

Windows Server AppFabric provides a Windows service called the Event Collector service that captures health and failure events from your services and writes these to a SQL Server monitoring store, or another store built to leverage the pluggable AppFabric monitoring solution. This provides analytical data about your applications. You can either take advantage of rich UI tooling integrated into IIS Manager to view these events in the monitoring store, or build your own reporting using SQL Server Reporting Services or another data analysis solution, to view this data.

Process Hosting

The key scenarios this enables are:

Efficiently using computer resources by hosting services in the Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) in IIS. IIS and the WF runtime are deeply integrated. For example, if IIS decides to recycle a process due to memory constrains it will communicate with the WF Service to ensure that a graceful shutdown occurs, thereby allowing the service to be restarted in another process or on another computer by the WMS.
Auto-start to “warm-up” services hosted in IIS. When the computer starts, or when IIS starts, services can be pre-warmed, thereby reducing the latency on the first message.

By integrating the WF runtime deeply with the IIS/WAS process activation model, WF Services are ideally suited to being hosted in IIS/WAS and benefit from the rich hosting capabilities that IIS/WAS provide.

Distributed Caching

Distributed, service-oriented applications often require support for a large number of users, and high performance, throughput, and short response time. Services are increasingly moving “far away” from their underlying data stores and in many cases those data stores are “expensive” to access due to both technical and licensing costs. As a result, developers are increasingly forced to find alternatives to continually accessing the physical data store and often turn to caching to meet these challenges.

Windows Server AppFabric provides a distributed, in-memory, application cache for developing scalable, available, and high-performance applications. The caching capabilities fuse memory across multiple computers to give applications a single unified cache view that can be easily scaled-out by simply adding more computers on demand.

Some key caching features provided by Windows Server AppFabric include:

Caching any serializable CLR object and providing access through simple cache APIs
Enterprise scale: tens to hundreds of computers
Configurable to run as a service accessed over the network
Dynamic scale-out by adding new nodes
High availability through backup copies
Automatic load-balancing
Seamless integration with ASP.NET with an ASP.NET Session State Provider (better perf and scale and no more sticky routing!)
Integration with administration and monitoring tools such as Windows PowerShell, Event Tracing for Windows, and System Center.

Tooling

The tooling support for services in Windows Server AppFabric will be covered in more detail by future posts. Integrating tooling into IIS Manager provides a familiar management, control, and monitoring experience for the IT professional managing applications in a production environment or the developer troubleshooting deployed applications. In addition, AppFabric provides an extensive set of Windows PowerShell commands to enable you to script the capabilities in the UI.

Summary

This post describes the key benefits of building WF Services with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, and the benefits of hosting these in Windows Server and managing and scaling them with AppFabric.

The deep integration of WCF and WF provides an intuitive approach for developing declarative WF Services. WF Services make it possible to build long-running services that take advantage of the service coordination support provided by the workflow runtime, enabling you to use workflow to solve key business problems.

Windows Server AppFabric adds improved hosting capabilities to Windows Server to efficiently host all your WCF services, including WF Services. Additionally, AppFabric provides common services that help you as a developer build scalable Web and composite applications.

Downloads

You can download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 from the Visual Studio 2010 page on MSDN.

You can download Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1 from AppFabric page on MSDN.

PDC 2009: Developing REST Applications with the .NET Framework

.NET Connected Framework Team — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:38:00 GMT

Attending Microsoft PDC 2009? Then come hear Henrik Frystyk Nielsen's presentation on Developing REST Applications with the .NET Framework. The talk gives an overview of 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.

New Beta 2 docs to help with code migration (from .NET 3.x and .NET 4 Beta 1)

Cliff Simpkins — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:06:08 GMT

Fresh on the heels of the beta 2 release of .NET 4/Visual Studio 2010, the team has been working on supplemental documentation to help you out with evaluation and adoption of WCF and WF in .NET 4.

Last week, two sets of documentation went live:

WF4 Migration Guidance: The WF team updated the documents to .NET Beta 2. We posted the documents up to the Downloads site mid last week.
B1->B2 Breaking Changes: The team also created a document that outlines the breaking changes between Beta 1 and Beta 2 of the .NET Framework 4.

We have a couple of new migration guidance documents in their final authoring/reviewing stages, and I hope to have them published out to the Downloads site by the time PDC comes around.

It’s exciting times having the second beta bits out, seeing what folks are doing with the new capabilities in .NET 4, and hearing from some customers that they are planning on taking advantage of the ”Go Live” License that is available with the Beta 2 release.

At any rate – happy Monday all – enjoy the docs and the new beta! If you’re heading to PDC and want to grab lunch with someone from the team while at the event, remember to drop me a note. BTW – I saw the shirts for the event last week – they look real nice!

3.5 SP1 RTM WCF Source Code Available

kmouss — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 01:36:00 GMT

Late in the summer we have released WCF sources publically in the reference source. You can now browse and debug WCF source code through Visual Studio. We are working to get the WF in reference source later this year. I will provide an update when WF is also available.

Please note that this is version-dependent and we currently support this for 3.5 SP1 RTM only. Any support QFE or GDR upgrades for the assemblies aren't currently part of the package. New updates will be available in future. Here are the options to browse or debug thorugh WCF sources:

Option 1 – Install & Local Debugging

Download Reference Source Code Center.
Install Reference Source WCF MSI in your local machine say under: 'C:\ReferenceSource'.
Launch Visual Studio 2008.
From the Tools menu, choose Options.
In the Options dialog box, open the Debugging node and select General

Uncheck "Enable Just My Code (Managed only)"
Check "Enable source server support"
Uncheck "Require source files to exactly match the original version"

Select Symbols under Debugging.
In the Symbol File Locations box, validate the location where the installed symbol files (.pdb) are present. If not, then add originally downloaded symbols location: C:\ReferenceSource\Symbols
Build you app, set breakpoints and F5 to debug..

Option 2 - Remote Debugging

You will need to make sure that the version of the framework is 3.5 SP1 RTM (no GDR update for now) as the project assemblies' versions and symbols must match. With this option you can debug and step through WCF framework code remotly through the reference source server.

Reference instructions under: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/serversetup.aspx

( Same as above, just set your .pdb location to: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/symbols )

All WCF, WF, and ‘Dublin’ sessions live on PDC site; 5 Weeks to Go!

Cliff Simpkins — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:01:09 GMT

We’re five weeks out from PDC09, and the rest of our sessions went live last week. I know I posted a couple weeks ago about PDC and sessions that went live, but I wanted to let folks know about the four new sessions – to help you maximize your experience around the Connected Framework technologies!

This looks to be a great event, as the team dives in deep on the enhancements coming with .NET 4, and discussing some of the thoughts around what’s to come next.

PDC Sessions of Note
The below list is a refresh of the one I posted a couple weeks ago, with additions marked out.

The larger team will be delivering the following seven sessions:

In addition to the sessions being done by the team, WCF comes up in several other sessions of note at the event:

On the Floor of the Event
As an update, we have confirmed that we will have a small 20-seat theatre in the Framework and Tools lounge area. In the theatre area, we’ll be doing a series shorter ‘chalk talks’, discussing more special interest topics. There are some real gems being planned for discussion; we’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

I’ll post up any additional notes as we come up on the event. And, as a reminder, drop a note if you want to catch up with someone from the team while at PDC. Let me know what you would like to discuss, and I’ll reach out to the team that will be in LA and try to connect you with someone so you can coordinate schedules.

Hope to see y’all in LA!
Cliff

The team is getting ready for PDC; are you?

Cliff Simpkins — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:19:03 GMT

The 2009 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is less than a couple months away, and the team is starting to create content and demos for the event. The team has been working with PDC event management over the last couple months to secure sessions and space at the event; and I wanted to share with you how the event is shaping up, as well as make a plug for our sessions.

The event will deliver a lot of really great material, as well as provide you with access to folks who are writing the code. We hope you can make it down to Los Angeles in November for the event.

PDC Sessions Of Note

So far, four sessions are currently live on the PDC event website:

In addition to the sessions being done by the team, WCF comes up in several other sessions of note at the event:

We are working very hard to not present the same content as last year.

For WF, we’re building upon last year’s introductions to WF4 to expose more of the underlying architecture of the new WF runtime, really giving you a view into how different the new runtime is…and demonstrating how workflow services work in the new Windows Application Server technology (codename ‘Dublin’).

For WCF, we heard you loud and clear that there wasn’t enough WCF content. This year, we have a session focusing on the WCF enhancements coming in .NET 4, in addition to the sessions covering how WCF is used with HPC Server, Silverlight, and covering advances in ADO.NET Data Services (which is built upon WCF).

And, last but not least, last year’s PDC introduced the technology called ‘Dublin’ – and it’s been a hot topic for customers ever since PDC. This year, we dive deeper into how ‘Dublin’ lights up WCF and WF applications and where we’re going with the technology.

We have a few more excellent sessions in the pipeline covering technology futures; and I’ll post the updated list up here when the next batch of sessions goes live.

On the Floor of the Event

Beyond sessions, speakers and other team members will be at the event in the lounge area for Framework and Tools, both to hang out and chat with you about the technologies, as well as working a couple booths in the lounge area to show the technologies in action.

Anyone attending PDC is encouraged to stop down to the lounge and say hello. Bring your questions or just share your thoughts on the technologies; we truly love meeting our customers – and your comments and questions do have direct impact on the shape of the future platform. If there’s someone in particular you would like to connect with, let me know – I’m happy to share folks’ lounge schedules as we come up on the event and schedules are finalized…just let me know who you’re looking to connect with or a particular topic you want to drill down on.

We are currently working on getting a small 20-seat chalk-talk area in the lounge area again this year to do smaller, more niche discussions. We’ll post more on that topic here in the coming weeks, as well, as we make progress on that front.

Pre-PDC Workshops

And, lastly, it’s worth noting that Michele Leroux Bustamante will be running a pre-PDC workshop covering the Microsoft Technology Roadmap, helping workshop attendees understand how the many technologies that make up the .NET Framework fit together – from A-W (Azure to Azure). ^_^

There is also a FREE Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp pre-PDC workshop that is open to anyone (whether attending PDC or not) as long as there is room.

Not registered? There’s still room!

There’s still room at the event, and I hear they have a $300 discount for folks registering before October 13 (and there’s also a significant discount for students and employees of academic institutions). And there is still plenty of hotel availability around the convention center as of a couple weeks ago (when I registered). A couple of the closest hotels were full, but there are still plenty of quality ones about.

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.

Improving the performance of web services in Silverlight 3 Beta

.NET Connected Framework Team — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:32:17 GMT

Cross-posted from the Silverlight Web Services Team Blog.

Silverlight 3 Beta introduces a new way to improve the performance of web services. You have all probably used the Silverlight-enabled WCF Service item template in Visual Studio to create a WCF web service, and then used the Add Service Reference command in your Silverlight application project in order to access the web service. In SL3, the item template has undergone a small change that turns on the new binary message encoder, which significantly improves the performance of the WCF services you build. Note that this is the same binary encoder which has been available in .Net since the release of WCF, so all WCF developers will find the object model very familiar.

The best part is that this is done entirely in the service configuration file (Web.config) and does not affect the way you use the service. (Check out this post for a brief description of exactly what the change is.)

I wanted to share some data that shows exactly how noticeable this performance improvement is, and perhaps convince some of you to consider migrating your apps from SL2 to SL3.

When Silverlight applications use web services, XML-based messages (in the SOAP format) are being exchanged. In SL2, those messages were always encoded as plain text when being transmitted; you could open a HTTP traffic logger and you would be able to read the messages. However using plain text is far from being a compact encoding when sending across the wire, and far from being fast when decoding on the server side. When we use the binary encoder, the messages are encoded using a WCF binary encoding, which provides two main advantages: increased server throughput and decreased message size.

Increased server throughput

Let’s examine the following graph (hat tip to Greg Leake of StockTrader fame for collecting this data). Here is the scenario we measure: the client sends a payload, the server receives it and sends it back to the client. Many clients are used to load the service up to its peak throughput. We run the test once using the text-based encoding and once using the new binary encoding and compare the peak throughput at the sever. We do this for 2 message sizes: in the smaller size the payload an array with 20 objects, and in the bigger one the payload is an array with 100 objects.

Some more details for the curious: The service is configured to ensure no throttling is happening, and a new instance of the service is created for every client call (known as PerCall instancing). There are ten physical clients driving load, each running many threads hitting service in tight loop (but with small 0.1 second think time between requests) using a shared channel to reduce client load. The graph measures peak throughput on the service at 100% CPU saturation. Note that in this test we did not use Silverlight clients but regular .Net clients. Since we are measuring server throughput it is not significant what the clients are.

When sending the smaller message we see a 24% increase in server throughput, and with the larger message size we see a 71% increase in server throughput. As the message complexity continues to grow, we should see even more significant gains from using the binary encoder.

What does that mean to you? If you run a service that is being used by Silverlight clients and you exchange non-trivial messages, you can support significantly more clients if the clients use SL3’s binary encoding. As usage of your service increases, that could mean being able to save on buying and deploying extra servers.

Decreased message size

Another feature of the binary encoder is that since messages sent on the wire are no longer plain-text, you will see a reduction in their average size. Let’s clarify this point: the main reason you would use the binary encoding is to increase the service throughput, as discussed in the previous section. The decrease in message size is a nice side-effect, but let’s face it: you can accomplish the same effect by turning on compression on the HTTP level.

This test was far less comprehensive than the previous one and we did it ad-hoc on my co-worker’s office machine. We took various objects inside a Silverlight control, and turned them into the same kind of SOAP messages that get sent to the service. We did this using the plain-text encoding and using binary encoding and then we compared the size of the messages in bytes. Here are our results:

The takeaway here is that the reduction of message size depends on the nature of the payload: sending large instances of system types (for example a long String) will result in a modest reduction, but the largest gains occur when complex object graphs are being encoded (for example objects with many members, or arrays).

What does this mean to you? If you run a web service and you pay your ISP for the traffic your service generates, using binary encoding will reduce the size of messages on the wire, and hopefully lower your bandwidth bills as traffic to your service increases.

Conclusion

We are confident that binary encoding is the right choice for most backend WCF service scenarios: you should never see a regression over text encoding when it comes to server throughput or message size; hopefully you will see performance gains in most cases. This is why the binary encoder is the new default in the Silverlight-enabled WCF Service item template in Visual Studio.

An important note: binary encoding is only supported by WCF services and clients, and so it is not the right choice if you aren’t using WCF end-to-end. If your service needs to be accessed by non-WCF clients, using binary encoding may not be possible. The binary AMF encoding used by Adobe Flex is similarly restricted to services that support it.

VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1 available for download!

kavitak — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:08:00 GMT

Yes! It's time. Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1 is available for general download now. Go get it here.

The Beta1 bits include significant updates to WCF and WF bits since our last CTP at the PDC last year. We're excited to share these bits with you, and we've created a few resources to help you explore:

SDK Samples for WCF and WF: Go get them here
Readmes for Samples: This link provides documentation of the samples you will find in the SDK
WCF WF Training Kit: Go get it here

We're very interested in your feedback - good and bad. We've created a few forums where you can provide feedback to us. The product team will be monitoring these forums, and we hope to create a good dialog with you. In addition, this would be a great place where the community can share information among themselves on WCF and WF.

Happy developing with WCF and WF 4.0!

The Road to 4 – WCF Changes between Beta 1 and CTP

Cliff Simpkins — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:42:00 GMT

As I mentioned in my post last week covering the changes in WF 4 since the CTP release, I promised that I would cover the WCF changes this week. As I sit down to write this post, this will have a different feel from the prior post – where the last post dealt with telling the story of why changes were made, I apologize in advance if this one reads more like a release notes document. That being said, let’s dive in to the changes…

In the upcoming Beta 1 release of .NET 4, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is receiving a series of enhancements aimed at expanding its usefulness and capabilities for connecting applications together using the .NET Framework. In this post, I would like to attempt to give you a quick tour of these improvements, to help guide you through items of interest as you think about evaluating the upcoming beta of Visual Studio 2010.

Workflow Services

I’m going to start with Workflow because it is a topic that is close to my heart, and WCF Workflow Services is a primary focus for WCF 4 improvements: to provide hosting and messaging capabilities to workflow-enabled services. In Beta 1, the team has worked with the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) team to provide new messaging activities, made adding service references easier, and added a new workflow service host to make hosting a WCF workflow service even easier in .NET 4.

New messaging activities: With Beta 1, several messaging activities are being added to WF 4 that makes use of WCF underneath to receive and send messages. Messaging activities features include:
- A Serialization programming model for messaging activities has been added to support both typed and untyped content for WCF code services
- Contract settings have been moved to individual messaging activities to simplify the service modeling of complex messaging activities. In these cases, the WSDL is inferred from the contract settings on the individual messaging activities.
- Transactions support for messaging activities that allow you to now flow transactions into workflows.
- Correlation in WF now supports long-running conversations using protocol-based and content-based correlation. This allows you to route messages to workflow instances based on either content or protocol parameters, allowing for correlation of messages from multiple clients.
- Durable Duplex: Beta 1 provides first-class support for long-running, two-way conversations between workflow services using the enhancements in correlation.
Add Service Reference in WF: Add Service Reference has been augmented to support generating typed client-side activities based on the WSDL, which makes it easier to create workflows that consume other services.
Declarative Service Authoring: To enable XAML authoring of workflows that send and receive messages, we support representing WCF constructs in XAML. In particular one can author a WCF workflow Service in XAML.
Workflow Service Host (a subclass of WCF ServiceHostBase) provides WF programs with support for
- Adds the WCF plumbing for messaging activities
- Integrated configuration
- Activation of workflows authored in XAML as well code. For workflow programs and workflow services authored in XAML, we introduced a .xamlx extension together with a corresponding registered IIS handler
- Instance management via a system provided control endpoint, so you can start, pause and resume
- Durable delay to allow you to put your workflows to sleep and resume later

For those who read my post last week covering the WF 4 changes, these changes plug into the changes to the out of the box activities, and this continues a story that demonstrates the complementary story of using services and processes together. The integration of WCF and WF started with .NET 3.5, as the teams started implementing extensions within each technology to take advantage of the two technologies together, and this story will get even better as the Windows application server technology extensions (codenamed ‘Dublin’) are released, which makes it even easier to host workflow services within Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) and IIS 7. As has been covered in PDC in October and will be discussed at TechEd next week, ‘Dublin’ provides a pre-built host environment that includes a database for workflow persistence and monitoring, along with management tooling built upon IIS Manager and PowerShell to allow you to manage and control WCF and WF instances.

Config Simplification

WCF Configuration simplification also receives a good number of enhancements in .NET 4 to address a common concern around getting started with WCF. This was most acutely felt by developers coming over from the ASP.NET world, where they are used to working with ASMX services.

To help reduce the complexities that .NET developers currently experience while getting simple services set up, the team has made the following investments in Beta 1:

<service> tags not required: An explicit <service> tag is no longer required to configure a service. As a result, many deployments won’t need a “per service” configuration; instead, the service will infer a default configuration, allowing you to deploy a .svc file onto your IIS instance without the need of creating or configuring a web.config file in order for the service to be callable. This behavior should be quite analogous to the creation and deployment of ASMX files in ASP.NET.
Default bindings and behaviors: In Beta 1, you can add behaviors to a config file without using a behavior name. Within the context of that config file, those behaviors become the default behavior, and they will be used for endpoints that don’t specify a behavior.
Standard endpoints: With Beta 1, the team is providing reusable system-provided endpoint configurations to facilitate scenarios where similarly configured endpoints are used across many services.
Support for .svc-less activation: When applications have many services to them, it results in an application that has a single folder with a large number of .svc files, where each .svc file is a one-line file to represent each service. The result is often a challenge in file management. As an alternative to having these .svc one-line files, WCF 4 enables you to list all of your services in a single web.config.

If we think about at deploying one or more WCF services into an activated environment (i.e., Internet Information Server (IIS) or Windows Process Activation Service (WAS)), this allows for the ability to deploy services into an environment without having to do explicit configuration. By default, WCF in .NET 4 will make assumptions for a web environment; but WCF 4 allows for these defaults to be specified at standard configuration levels available to the .NET programmer using the standard configuration options (i.e., app.config, web.config, machine.config, etc). This should make it easier for WCF services to be managed and moved between environments as the service progresses from development to production.

Messaging Improvements

WCF Beta 1 also introduces a series of messaging improvements that improve the discoverability, performance, and scalability of systems that build upon WCF.

Service Discovery: Beta 1 adds service discovery using WS-Discovery
- Ad-hoc discovery: Services are able to publish their own services on a local subnet using a UDP multi-cast channel that is specific to the discovery feature
- Proxy-managed discovery: WCF also allows for the use of a WS-Discovery proxy to use discovery over a larger network or to reduce UDP multi-cast traffic
- Interoperable with Windows Vista’s WS-Discovery support
Router Service: With Beta 1, WCF now includes a configurable WCF-based router service that supports content-based routing and protocol bridging.
- The new content based routing capability allows for WCF to perform message filtering based on content contained in either the SOAP headers or within the message body (using a specified XPATH). Protocol bridging in WCF 4 enables the creation of bridge system bindings; for example, you may have a WCF service that uses WS-* SOAP endpoint to communicate with business partners outside the firewall and with non-.NET systems, but to use NetNamedPipes or TCP inside the firewall to communication with your other .NET services.
- Error handling routing is implemented to allow increased flexibility. With Beta 1, WCF 4 allows for the definition of alternative send destinations. If the routing service encounters a CommunicationException or Timeout while routing your message, it will automatically resend the message to the next destination endpoint your configured.
Support Queues with competing consumers: In .NET 3.5, it is difficult to implement long-running processes that worked with queues without having to make extensive use of the “poison queue” – particularly when a developer wanted to have multiple processes/machines working a single queue.
As an example, imagine a system that uses queues with WCF Workflow Services. In this example, WCF needs to be able to peek into the queue and lock the message so that it can try to dispatch it to a corresponding WF instance for work. If it is not yet possible to process the message (due to the WF instance already being locked), WCF needs to put the message back into the queue – which is problematic in .NET 3.5. In .NET 4 Beta 1, WCF 4 adds support for a “peek / lock” mechanism to the WCF MSMQ channel that now allows WCF to solve this issue.
BLOB encoder: Beta 1 provides an encoder that is optimized for sending opaque binary content as a message. In this implementation, it’s simply a write-through wrapping encoder that takes what you give it and pushes it across the wire. While it may not be as full-featured as many might want, this was something that we needed for our internal needs, and we’re exposing it for others to use if they find it useful.

In addition to the above, the team made Serialization improvements in Beta 1 that adds extensibility around dynamic “known types” resolution to improve serialization in WCF on the wire. In .NET 3.5, the DataContractSerializer class requires developers to explicitly specify a white list of “known types” that can occur in the object graph. With .NET 4 Beta 1, the team adds a new DataContractResolver class that allows the .NET developer to override this “white list” constraint by overriding what type name gets serialized and what type gets deserialized. While a lower-level and more complicated feature, it’s functionality that has been long-promised for those wanting increased control over how data is serialized and deserialized. Examples of scenarios that can be accomplished using the new feature: removing the “known types” constraint for tightly coupled scenarios; making entire assembly “known” to serializer; etc

REST Improvements

We also continue to augment WCF REST support with features that have already been made available as part of the WCF REST Starter Kit preview releases. For the Beta 1 release, the team has added a couple of the Starter Kit features into WCF 4: (a) the capability for WCF REST services to make use of the ASP.NET caching infrastructure; and (b) automatically generated help pages that allow WCF REST services describe themselves through an automatically generated help web page – detailing which URLs to call, schemas, and examples of the request and response messages (both XML and JSON).

Tracing and Diagnostics

Last but not least, tracing and diagnostics in WCF 4 reduces the noise and the performance overhead of tracing WCF events by making use of Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) and to improving the performance of using performance counters. With Beta 1, the team has refactored diagnostic events and WCF is now sending a few high-value events via ETW. This change also surfaced in my posting on new features in WF 4 Beta 1; and, as with WF, there will be SDK samples to help folks understand better this and take advantage of this high-performance tracing option. These improvements should yield significant improvements to folks debugging a live system in production.

Features in the Beta 1 that Won’t Make RTM

Lastly, as with any beta release, it represents an evolving codebase as it moves toward a releasable product, and the features and functionality can [and typically do] shift. Within the Beta 1, there are two features that are unlikely to appear in .NET 4 that I’d like to quickly touch upon:

Local Channel: We won’t be able to deliver the high-performant in-AppDomain channel in time for .NET 4. The beginning of a local (also known as 'in-proc') channel shows up in the Beta 1, but it’s in its early stages and unfinished; given resources and timing, the local channel capability will be removed in .NET 4 and won’t be present in the RTM bits.
Durable Service Host Extensions: WorkflowServiceHost provides an extensibility mechanism called DurableServiceHostExtension that allows host application developers to receive notifications for state changes of the service instance and perform control operations specific to the service instance. This general extensibility mechanism will likely go away in .NET 4 RTM in exchange for a more scoped, but robust, functionality.

And it’s off to TechEd!

I’m off to TechEd for the next week, and I’ll try to give some word from the ground, but I’m likely to disappear again for a couple weeks. When we get back from TechEd, I’m going to try and work my way back another step – discussing what WCF 4 and WF 4 mean for the .NET 3.5 developer, and how those developers should approach the technologies.

I hope that this (and the prior) post is useful and informative. At least a few customers that I’ve spoken with over the past year have expressed a desire to get information out in this fashion. If you’re at the event next week, I’m a huge fan of feedback.

Rundown on WCF, WF, and ‘Dublin’ sessions @ TechEd next week

Cliff Simpkins — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:27:05 GMT

As I spend much of this week finalizing items for TechEd next week, I thought it might be helpful to post a schedule of the great content that will be presented at the event.

If you haven’t already pre-registered for sessions, now is an excellent time to look through the schedule builder and check out all the great content and speakers we have lined up at the event.

As is tradition, the bulk of the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) sessions are in the SOA and Business Process track. This year, we are joined in the SOA track by sessions covering the ‘Dublin’ technology extensions for Windows Server, which allow you to easily host and manage your .NET 4 WCF and WF applications.

Breakout Sessions

This year, we’ve assembled some of the greatest speakers on the topics, so please join us for the following breakout sessions:

Session	Title	Speaker	Timeslot	Room
SOA201	A First Look at WCF and WF in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4	Aaron Skonnard	Tues, May-12; 8:30am	Petree Hall D
SOA202	A Lap around Microsoft Code Name "Dublin"	Dan Eshner	Tues, May-12; 2:45pm	Room 404
SOA206	Every Class As a Service: WCF As the New Microsoft .NET	Juval Lowy	Thus, May-14; 2:45pm	Room 151
SOA302	Building RESTful Services Using WCF	Jon Flanders	Thurs, May-14; 10:15am	Room 404
SOA303	Busy Microsoft .NET Developer's Guide to WCF, SOA, and Success	Jon Flanders	Fri, May-15; 1:00pm	Room 151
SOA309	Load Balancing and Scaling Your WCF Services Today and Tomorrow	Michèle Leroux Bustamante	Weds, May-13; 4:30pm	Room 515B
SOA310	Managing, Tracking, and Troubleshooting Services in "Dublin"	Ford McKinstry	Tues, May-12; 4:30pm	Room 403A
SOA401	Developing Service Oriented Workflows	Brian Noyes	Weds, May-13; 8:30am	Room 502B

For those unable to attend TechEd in person, my understanding is that all of the breakout sessions above will be recorded and be made available online. As we get more information post-event, we will post additional information up here on the blog.

In addition to the breakout sessions above, there is content that will be presented at TechEd that will unfortunately not be made available online after the event, this comes in three forms: the pre-conference sessions and interactive theatre sessions.

Pre-Conference Session

As I mentioned in my blog post on Friday, Zoiner Tejada and Michele Leroux Bustamante will be presenting a pre-conference on Sunday, the day before TechEd (PRC07: A Day of WCF + WF + "Dublin") that covers WCF and WF for .NET 4. The day is full of presentations and demos, and Michele and Zoiner have worked hard to update the session to cover the beta 1 features we’re talking about here. There are still seats available for the pre-conference, and it looks to be a real treat for those who can make it.

Interactive Theatre Sessions

Additionally, there are interactive theatre sessions that happen on the event floor among the booths. Within the Application Platform section of the floor (you can find us by looking for lots of blue), we have two theatres. Within the interactive theatres, we will have the following three sessions over the course of the week in Blue Theatre 2 that many folks are sure to find interesting:

Session	Title	Speaker	Timeslot
SOA02-INT	Communicating with State Machine Workflows	Philip Wolfe	Tues, May-12 1:00pm
SOA03-INT	Interacting with Web Services Using Microsoft Silverlight	Yavor Georgiev	Tues, May-12 4:30pm
SOA05-INT	Migrating a WF 3.0 Application to the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 and Microsoft Code Name "Dublin"	Tom Castiglia Zoiner Tejada	Weds, May-13 10:15am

Hands On Labs

We also have six hands on labs at TechEd this year, the two introducing labs have been updated based on past event feedback, and we’ve added four of brand new labs! If you have an 45-60 minutes and like to get your hands dirty with some code while you learn, please check them out:

HOL Code	HOL Title
SOA09-HOL	WCF REST: Addressability of Resources
SOA10-HOL	WCF REST: Exposing a Resource Collection with the WCF REST Starter Kit
SOA12-HOL	WCF 3.5: Introducing Windows Communication Foundation 3.5
SOA13-HOL	WCF 3.5: Unit Testing Windows Communication Foundation 3.5
SOA14-HOL	WCF and WF 3.5: Using Advanced Context Management in WCF Workflow Services 3.5
SOA15-HOL	WF 3.5: Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5

Booth

Then of course there is always the booth. The booth is open every day of the conference, and we’ll have folks there through lunch and during sessions – ready to chat with you about the technologies and show you how things work. If you have questions about WCF, WF, or ‘Dublin’, or would like to learn more about how the technologies may apply to your solution – feel free to drop by.

Over the course of the week, we have folks at the booth that can talk at a high level (BTW-that’s me ;-) ), all the way to folks that can talk through how and why the API works the way it does. And if you can’t get your question answered at that time, we should be able to help you connect with someone at the booth who can help, or getting you the answer post-conference. We have a really good crew at the booth again this year (and I’m told we have a small white board at the booth this year!)

All of that being said, we hope to see you in LA next week and to learn more about how you’re using WCF and WF today – it should be a lot of fun all around. And for those unable to attend, check out the online recordings and continue to engage with us in the forums and the Connect site!