Kavitak's WebLog : .Net

WF 4 Migration Guidance now live on MSDN

kavitak — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:07:00 GMT

Our team has posted a set of WF 4 Migration documents on MSDN.

You'll find 4 papers initially -

an overview document which introduces migration concerns and what to do for the WF3 developer.
a best practices for WF3 development paper - how to design your WF3 artifacts today to help with the move to WF4
a document on Rules guidance which I've authored
a document on State Machine guidance

You can find them here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bd94c260-b5e0-4d12-93ec-53567505e685&displaylang=en

We hope you find these documents useful, and I am personally interested in hearing from the Rules folks on the guidance I've provided in the Rules document.

VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 now available for public download

kavitak — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:57:00 GMT

Earlier this week, we released Beta1 to MSDN subscribers. I am happy to share that the bits are now available for general public download! Go get them here.

WCF and WF .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1 Training Kit

kavitak — Wed, 20 May 2009 02:11:00 GMT

In addition to the Beta1 samples I linked to, you may also find the training kit useful - it has more detailed walkthroughs of key features. Get it here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wcfwf4

WF and WCF .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1 samples

kavitak — Wed, 20 May 2009 02:02:00 GMT

When you download VS2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1, you do not automatically get the samples.

To get the SDK samples that the team put together, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=5aca0622-d87d-4cc9-a22c-0d58205a56b4#tm

Beta1 Forums

kavitak — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:14:00 GMT

Here's a link to the Beta1 forums where you can provide feedback and ask questions:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/VSPreRelease,netdevelopmentprerelease,visualstudioprerelease,vstsprerelease

Our team will be watching the WF Beta1 forum closely!

VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1!

kavitak — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:59:00 GMT

I'm finally excited to share that .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 is being released this week! After having kept it low key and quiet for so long, and a limited distribution at the PDC last year, it is great that this week, Beta1 will be available more generally. Today, Beta1 bits were released to MSDN customers and Beta1 documentation went live on MSDN. In addition, forums have been created for soliciting feedback. On May 20th, Wednesday, Beta1 will be available on MSDN download center for everyone. Here is the VS 2010 page.

Me and my team definitely look forward to hearing all the feedback you have on Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.0.

We will be publishing content about WF 4.0 on http://blogs.msdn.com/endpoint

PDC is here!

kavitak — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:07:00 GMT

Finally, the PDC week is here.

At the Ray Ozzie keynote this morning, he announced Windows Azure - www.azure.com - Windows in the Cloud. Azure will be the basis for the Microsoft Services Platform. .NET Online Services, Live Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services and CRM Services are all technologies that add value to the cloud platform helping you build highly scalable and available applications that run on the cloud.

In addition, we've unveiled a few new initiatives and downloads - check them out here!

Models Remixed

Oslo Developer Center

REST Starter Kit

I will be giving a chalk talk in the Tools, Languages and Frameworks Lounge on the 4.0 Activities on Day 4 at 10:15am. See you there!

PDC, here we come!

kavitak — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:27:00 GMT

The premier Microsoft conference, the PDC - Professional Developers Conference, is happening in the week of Octobert 26th in Los Angeles! Microsoft stars will join movie stars and present a bunch of upcoming technologies and paradigms to thousands of developers.

There are still seats left, so please register if you havent already. You can pre-register for sessions you'd like to attend here.

We have a few talks on the technologies my team works on - WCF/WF. I hope to see you at these sessions or in the lounge where a bunch of product folks will be hanging around waiting to answer your questions. We know we've been quiet and we want to break the silence!

WF 4.0: A First Look, Kenny Wolf

Programs coordinate work. The code for coordination and state management often obscures a program's purpose. Learn how programming with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4.0 provides clarity of intent while preserving the functional richness of the .NET framework. See how easy it is to build workflows with the new Visual Studio workflow designer. Learn about text-based authoring options for WF. Hear how WF integrates well with other Microsoft technologies (WCF, WPF, ASP.NET). If you've looked at WF before, come and see the changes to data flow, composition, and new control flow styles. Significant improvements to usability, composability, and performance make Workflow a great fit for a broad range of solutions on both the client and the server.

WCF 4.0: Building WCF Services with WF in Microsoft .NET 4.0, Ed Pinto

Eliminate the tradeoff between ease of service authoring and performant, scalable services. Hear about significant enhancements in WCF and WF to deal with the ever increasing complexity of communication. Learn how to use WCF to correlate messages to service instances using transport, context, and application payloads. See how the new WF messaging activities enable the modeling of rich protocols. Learn how WCF provides a default host for workflows exposing features such as distributed compensation and discovery. See how service definition in XAML completes the union of WF and WCF with a unified authoring experience that simplifies configuration and is fully integrated with IIS activation and deployment

WF 4.0: Extending with Custom Activities , Matt Winkler

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) coordinates and manages individual units of work, encapsulated into activities. WF comes with a rich library of activities. Learn how to extend this library by encapsulating your own APIs with custom activities. See how to compose those basic activities into higher level units using rules, flowchart, and state machine control flow styles. Learn how to build your own WF control styles. Learn how to customize and re-host the workflow authoring experience using the new WF designer framework.

WCF: Developing RESTful Services , Steve Maine

Learn the latest features in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for building Web 2.0-style services that use URIs, HTTP GET, and other data formats beyond XML. See how these features can be applied to AJAX web sites, "REST" applications, and data feeds.

Microsoft .NET Framework: Declarative Programming Using XAML , Rob Relyea/Daniel Roth

If you're using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), or Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), then XAML is your new best friend! Learn how an entire application-from presentation to data to services to workflow--can be authored using simple, declarative XAML notations introduced in the next version of the .NET Framework. Learn about XAML additions like: support for generics, object references, non-default constructors, and more.

WCF: Zen of Performance and Scale , Nicholas Allen

Join us for an interactive lunch discussion about different kinds of performance and scale requirements that are a crucial part of any distributed systems development life cycle. Learn the principles of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) throughput and responsiveness optimization. Hear about WCF scalability improvements in the next version of the Microsoft .NET Framework.

.NET Framework 3.5 release and available for download

kavitak — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:55:00 GMT

The final bits for 'Orcas' or .NET Framework 3.5 are now available for download! I must say this was a relatively quick, feature packed release for us.

Get it here.

For the Connected Framework team in which I work in, we concentrated on 4 major themes for this release:

*Make WCF into a great platform with support for all common web formats. This includes work we did for ASP.NET AJAX, XML and JSON encoders, syndication support with RSS and ATOM, and first class REST support

*Integrate Workflow and WCF. I must say as one of the folks running our community/customer program within the team right now, I see this as the #1 reason why customers are moving to Orcas. Being able to build services using workflows & make them long running and durable; and exposing workflows as services are both pretty powerful features.

*Finish WS-* work. We completed the standardization process for WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Transactions and WS-Policy.

*Provide tooling! This was one of the other big customer asks. When we shipped 3.0, we had add on packages for VS (as CTPs) for WCF tooling. With Orcas, this is now release quality and part of VS.

We look forward to adoption of the 3.5 platform!!

Finally - Oslo announced!

kavitak — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 23:18:00 GMT

This past week, we announced "Oslo" at the SOA-BP conference in Redmond. Oslo is the code name for a group of technical investments we're making over the next couple of years to simplify designing, building and managing composite applications. This is what I've been working on since we shipped WCF and WF in the .NET Framework 3.0. I'm specifically working on the Rules features we're adding in the next version of the .NET Framework and on the Activities we will ship in the .NET Framework.

Code as data, it's pretty neat

kavitak — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 02:26:00 GMT

So I have to admit I've been late in jumping to the "code as data" magic! I did play around with LINQ and the lambda syntax back last year with the May CTP, and found it really simple and powerful - reminding me of the days I worked with ML. I did not, however, play with System.Expressions until recently.

Lambda expressions can be compiled as expression trees. Expression trees are data objects that efficiently represent the algorithm of evaluating the lambda expression in memory. These expression trees can be manipulated by code – the concept of metaprogramming. Also, by calling Compile on the resulting expression tree, you can dynamically generate executable code corresponding to the expression and then you can call Invoke to actually invoke the compiled code with the appropriate parameters. Calling Compile returns a delegate of type T which is the IL dynamically generated from the expression tree. Converting data (expression tree) to code whenever evaluation is required is pretty powerful!

The compiler is smart because if you assign a lambda expression to a delegate type like Func<..>, then it generates IL, but if you assign the lambda expression to Expression<T>, the compiler doesn’t generate IL – it generates the in-memory tree of objects that represent the structure of the expression.

A classic use of this is to write a parser which takes a string that represents an expression and converts it into an expression tree representing the code needed to evaluate that expression. Once the tree is constructed, you have an expression evaluator by just calling Compile. Neat.

DinnerNow has been updated!

kavitak — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 08:30:00 GMT

An updated version of Dinner Now is now available - (version 1.2)

http://www.CodePlex.com/DinnerNow

The new version has several bug fixes and a few enhancements.

Out-workflow PowerShell Commandlet - David Aiken developed a custom commandlet for Windows PowerShell allows a user to quickly display a workflow based on the data returned from another commandlet. For example, by simply running the command get-workflow | out-workflow in PowerShell, a user will be able to visually see the status of a running workflow in the workflow designer control.
Live Service Trace Viewer – The Live Service Trace Viewer is sample that Craig McMurtry initially developed for WCF. It allows you to view a graphical diagram that illustrates the interaction between sender(s) and receiver(s) in a WCF application. You can find out more about this sample on Craig’s blog. We have upgraded the Live Service Trace Viewer to the RTM version of the .NET Framework 3.0 and we have also embedded it inside of MMC 3.0. Consequently, from MMC you can now monitor both the workflows and services in the DinnerNow sample.
CardSpace Address Information – It is now possible to provide your address information as optional claims in your self-issued CardSpace information card and use this address during the checkout process.

DinnerNow.net is live on CodePlex

kavitak — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 20:54:00 GMT

Our evangelism team has built a new sample application called DinnerNow.net. It is a fictious online marketplace for people to order food from a variety of restaurants. The samples showcases a bunch of the .Net Framework 3.0 technologies - WF, WCF, WPF and Windows Cardspace. It also uses Windows Vista features such as the Windows Sidebar, and Web technologies like ASP.Net, Ajax, Virtual Earth etc. You can download the source code, documentation, set up scripts from here: http://www.codeplex.com/dinnernow. You can find other DinnerNow resources as http://www.dinnernow.net

Enjoy!

Linq to XSD releases Alpha today

kavitak — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 09:43:00 GMT

A month ago I was investigating authoring WF rules against XML. We dont support it out of the box, but a simple way of achieving this is by exposing your XML schema as a .Net type - and then author rules against that type. Simple, and doable with XSD.exe. Then I came across the "Linq to XSD" project within Microsoft, which gives you another way of doing this - it creates a .Net type for your schema which is Linq friendly which means you get all the type-ness you get from XSD and you also get the rich query model of Linq. The Linq to XSD project template has an additional build action on your .xsd and generates the type behind the scenes and compiles it in your assembly - pretty decent integration. And then if you love the expressiveness of Linq, you can just party on the generated type.

The team has finally released a public alpha preview today so I can actually talk about this - Congrats to Ralf and his team! Check out the alpha today - you will find all you need here: http://blogs.msdn.com/xmlteam/archive/2006/11/27/typed-xml-programmer-welcome-to-linq.aspx

If you try to get this working with a WF project template in VS, you wont be able to do so in the same project. The reason is that WF needs a C# Code Provider corresponding to the version of the C# compiler used by Linq and that's not available yet in the set up. Questions, let me know.

We've shipped .Net Framework 3.0

kavitak — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 07:49:00 GMT

After being on the WCF team for almost 4.5 years, I can tell you we've all been waiting for this day. You can now download WCF (and WF and WPF) as part of the .Net Framework 3.0 release here. This is not Beta1, or Beta2, or RC0 or RC1 - this is the final one!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=10CC340B-F857-4A14-83F5-25634C3BF043&displaylang=en