Jim O'Neil's Blog : WCF

WCF CHAMP

joneil — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 06:19:45 GMT

I guess I’m showing my age, but the first thing I thought of when hearing about this clip (below) was the 1979 movie with Jon Voight (er, Angelina’s dad for the GenXers). Microsoft’s recent take on the theme may not be Oscar material, but if you’re crying at the end of this, it’s from laughing…

This is part of the WCF Champ vs. The Contender site launched today to provide a gateway to materials on getting started with WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). WCF is as ambitious as it is powerful, configurable as it is encompassing, SOAPy as it is RESTful. The site is a compendium of resources that help lower the barrier of entry and give you a place to start whether you’re a web developer, enterprise architect, or already got your head in the cloud.

By the way, stay tuned; there’s a couple more of these videos coming.

Get RESTy With It

joneil — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:06:00 GMT

Preview 2 of the WCF REST Starter Kit is now available on CodePlex. I covered an earlier version of the Starter Kit during our Northeast Roadshow last December. As you may recall, the WCF REST Starter Kit enables you to pretty quickly build singleton and collection resource-based services that support both Atom, XML, and JSON serialization formats.

The update adds a new HttpClient class that streamlines the connection to and invocation of RESTful calls, with support for the primary REST HTTP verbs – GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. Another really cool addition is an add-in that creates a serializable class based on an XML string, making it just that much easier to consume REST-based services, regardless of where they are hosted.

There’s four great labs as well to get you started (which I got to check out pre-release). So, even if the only thing you know about REST is how to spell it, these concise exercises will get you up and running in no time:

Lab 1 – Hello REST
Lab 2 – Addressability
Lab 3 - REST Collection
Lab 4 - Consuming RESTful Services

Download the WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2 here.

Download the Hands-On Labs here.

Latest ARCast... Featuring Chris Bowen

joneil — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 06:20:10 GMT

In the latest ARCast.TV episode, Bob Familiar interviews the authors - including the fabulous Chris Bowen - of the newly released Essential Windows Communication Foundation for .NET Framework 3.5 from Addison-Wesley.

ARCast.TV - Essential WCF