Kavitak's WebLog : WCF

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!

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.

Come learn WF and WCF - quick and valuable how-to screencast series!

kavitak — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:48:00 GMT

WCF and WF have been out since November 2006, and they are both still relatively new technologies. To help get started, our marketing team has worked with our friends over in Pluralsight to set up a weekly 7 - 12 minute screencast series exploring short, targeted topics.

The first screencast went live this morning and can be found here. Hope you find it helpful! It is a short screencast that walks you through creating your first WCF Service Library using Visual Studio 2008, and then hosting and testing it using the tooling support that went in the Visual Studio 2008 release. From the initial release and practically no tool support in Visual Studio 7, we've come a long way in providing the tools needed to quickly develop and test services by deploying them locally on your development box!

In the regular weekly series, you will see various topics on both WCF and WF. If you have request for specific topics, please let us know and we can try and cover those.

Cliff Simpkins and others from our marketing team have also created a new team blog - the 'endpoint' blog in case you haven't seen it yet. Various team members will be posting content on the blog, hope to see more on Oslo and the .NET Framework 4.0 around and after PDC.

A bunch of WCF and WF webcasts in June

kavitak — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:04:00 GMT

Our marketing team has launched a series of MSDN webcasts to explore the possibilities of Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework through demonstrations and deep dives on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).

You can find links to our June MSDN Webcasts here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnnetframework35.aspx?tab=webcasts&id=liveall

.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.

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.

Patterns and Practices: Web Service Software Factory has been released

kavitak — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 01:43:00 GMT

Don Smith from the Patterns and Practices group has published an architectural and development guideline around the Web Service Software Factory specifically for WCF.

The Web Service Software Factory (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance that helps our customers quickly and consistently construct Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns. The Service Factory provides guidance that addresses many of the challenges associated with building WCF and ASP.NET Web services and the components of a distributed application. These challenges include:

Designing WCF and ASMX messages and service interfaces.
Creating service contracts from existing WSDL and XSD files.
Applying exception shielding and exception handling.
Designing business entities in the domain model.
Translating messages to and from business entities.
Designing, building, and invoking the data access layer.
Validating many aspects of the service using code analysis.
Applying message-level security to WCF services.
Planning for the migration to WCF.
Applying message validation.

Find it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/servicefactory

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

RC1 Windows SDK docs are live!

kavitak — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 03:54:00 GMT

Get it here: http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx

Feedback welcome!

Here are quick links to WCF and WF docs / samples:

WCF:

Docs: http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731082.aspx

Samples: http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms751514.aspx

WF:

Docs: http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms735967.aspx

Samples: http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms741723.aspx

Rules

kavitak — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 22:46:00 GMT

With WCF RC1 out the door last week, I changed roles from being a test lead for the WCF Transports, Channels and Message feature to being a Program Manager on the WF Rules team. I'm excited to start on my new role, and in a new space. I'll be working with Jurgen Willis, a known name in the Rules space - he has delivered most of the docs / samples / presentations you'll find on WF Rules today. Other folks on the team are Moustafa Ahmed, a PM who started on the Rules team a couple of months ago after having owned the Tracking feature in Windows Workflow Foundation V1 release. As I was looking to see if anyone else has a blog on the Rules team, I came across Don McCrady's personal site - didn't know he was into stargazing. Don is the Dev Lead on the Rules team.

The WF Rules team is responsible for the business rules features in both Windows Workflow Foundation and Biztalk Server (the Biztalk Rules Engine component). At the moment, I'm spending time ramping up on WF, rules, and getting my feet wet. One thing I will start doing is focus my blog on Rules and start sharing what I'm learning and exploring in this space.

For starters, this article from Jurgen Willis, is an excellent one - it explains what Rules are, how they are exposed within Windows Workflow Foundation, and how the WF Rules Engine does evaluation and how you can control evaluation through chaining and priorities.

WCF Ships RC1!

kavitak — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 22:39:00 GMT

Last week, the WCF team finally signed off on RC1. WCF was a long product cycle, I personally have been with the team for about 4.5 years and there are folks who've been with the team for 6 years! We're now in escrow. It felt great to finally lock down the release - hope you can download and play with our RC1 bits and share feedback and questions with the team. You can download them here.