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ATTENTION WEB DEVELOPERS WCAG 2.0 Moves to Last Stage in W3C Approval Process

For those of you (like me) who are interested in Accessibility and/or need to ensure your websites remain in compliance with section 508 you'll be interested to know that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 was published as a W3C Proposed Recommendation on Nov. 3, 2008. This means that the technical material of WCAG 2.0 is complete and it has been implemented in real sites. WCAG 2.0 has now been submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) membership for final review and endorsement, and final publication is expected in December 2008.

WCAG 2.0 defines how to make Web sites, Web applications, and other Web content accessible to people with disabilities. The guidelines and extensive technical supporting documentation was developed as part of the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative.

 Over the next few weeks I'll be posting more information as these guidlines become ratified and also discussing ways to ensure your sites are ready for the new requirements!!

 

Stay tuned!!

-Pat Weikle

CloudCamp Federal 08 (Washington, DC)

Just wanted to inform our readers that Vlad Vinogradsky, Marc Schweigert and myself will attend CloudCamp Federal 08 that takes place on November 12 between 15:00 - 21:00.

"CloudCamp is an unconference where early adapters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas."

It was sold out but the organizer just opened up another 25 slots so get one while you can.

For more information and registration please visit CloudCamp's website.

If you are attending, please look us up.

Cheers,

Patrick Svenburg

HOT: 30% DISCOUNT on Visual Studio

For anyone considering an upgrade to Visual Studio Team System 2008 we've just announced a promotion (shall we say an economic stimulus package for developers ;)

Details are available at -

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/promotions/overview.mspx 

Excellent opportunity to get the best developer products for the .Net platform at a very attractive price.

Vote for Visual Studio 2008!

ANNOUNCING: Developer Dinner On Demand

My team delivers a monthly Developer Dinner for US Public Sector Partners in Reston, Virginia.  At the dinners, we give 90-120 minute developer focused presentations on recently released / future developer technologies.  We have had great success with the dinners over the years.  Much of the success can be attributed to Robert Shelton who began the series a few years ago.  Robert has since moved to a new team within Microsoft.  I have the pleasure of assuming responsibility for the dinners. 

There are two challenges with the dinners we’d like to solve.  First, they have become so popular that we have to cap registration at a number that will ensure we don’t have an overcrowded room. Second, only people in the DC metropolitan area get an opportunity to attend.  Our team is focused on all customers/partners that do work for the US Public Sector (Federal, State, and Local Government).  Clearly, there are more customers/partners in the US than just the DC area:).

Moving forward, all of our dinners will be recorded and published for on demand viewing.  We’ve already had two dinners this fiscal year., but unfortunately we weren’t able to record them.  However, I am in the process of recording and publishing both of them.  I’m just redelivering the content in my office in order to record them (without an audience).  In the future, you can expect these to be live recordings complete with customer Q&A.

How do you keep up with the recordings?

First, you can bookmark http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/pages/partnerdeveloperdinnerondemand.aspx.  This will contain a running list of all the recorded dinners.  The first recording is available now!

Second, I have created a DevDinner tag on the my team’s blog:

Browser: http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/archive/tags/DevDinner/default.aspx

RSS: http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/rss_tag_DevDinner.xml

I will make sure this tag is used only for upcoming dinner announcements, follow up links/downloads from presentations, and notifications when dinners are published.

-Marc

Posted by Public Sector DPE Team | 1 Comments
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DevDinnerOnDemand: Overview of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

With the .NET Framework 3.5 (the version native to Visual Studio 2008) coming up on its first anniversary, Microsoft is poised to release the first update to the framework in the form of Service Pack (SP1).  This Service Pack is unlike your standard Service Pack, in that it will introduce new features/capabilities to the .NET Framework.  Some of these features where originally planned to be in the initial release of the framework and others are features/capabilities added to enhance or further secure the core .NET Framework.  The August Developer Dinner is going to focus on some of the new features as well as a few of the new enhancements, to give you an introduction of the improved capabilities of the Microsoft Developer Platform.

What you will learn:

This evenings presentation will be a running stream of demonstration focusing on new features and functionality coming in the new Service Pack for several of the key areas of .NET Development today, including Web Development (ASP.NET), Database Development (ADO.NET), Web Services/SOA (Windows Communication Foundation) and User Experience (Windows Presentation Foundation).

You will see demonstrations that will include:

  • Making data access easier with the ADO.NET Entity Framework.
  • Exposing your data access layer using ADO.NET Data Services
  • Building “Data Entry” Web-based applications faster than ever using ASP.NET Dynamic Data.
  • Making AJAX Applications faster with script combining and easier with built in support for handling browser history (i.e. back/forward buttons).
  • How to achieve up to 40% faster startup performance for your WPF applications and further improve the startup experience using a splash screen.
  • Reducing the time it takes to deploy your WPF applications using the New .NET Framework Client Profile.
  • Build services faster using enhancements in WCF.

View Recording:

SilverLightLogo Silverlight   WmvLogo WMV

The follow up post for this developer dinner is http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/archive/2008/08/21/follow-up-developer-dinner-on-net-framework-3-5-sp1.aspx.

-Marc

ESB guidance

A new set of ESB guidance has been released by the Patterns and Practices team. Details below:

 

 

 

Microsoft patterns & practices is excited to announce the latest addition to
the p&p library of software architecture guidance:

 

ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP

October 2008 Release

 

 

Quick Links:

                    MSDN site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/esb

                    Community Extensions: http://codeplex.com/esb

 

What is ESB Guidance ?

The Microsoft ESB Guidance provides architectural guidance, patterns, practices, and a set of BizTalk Server R2 and .NET components to simplify the development of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform and to allow Microsoft customers to extend their own messaging and integration solutions. The Microsoft ESB Guidance consists of a series of interoperating components that support and implement a loosely coupled messaging environment that makes it easier to build message-based enterprise applications. The services and components fall naturally into the following seven categories:

·         Web services. These expose internal services such as itinerary processing, exception management, resolution of endpoints and maps, BizTalk operations, UDDI interoperation, and transformation of message content.

·         Itinerary services and centralized store. These include agents for performing transformations and message delivery. You can resolve itinerary from the store and create custom services that participate in Itinerary processing.

·         Itinerary on-ramps. These receive external messages using either SOAP or WCF. On-ramps expose the itinerary SOAP header and perform itinerary processing, using the Microsoft ESB Guidance Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework for dynamic resolution of endpoints and metadata.

·         On-ramps. These receive external messages in a range of formats and transports, such as HTTP, JMS, WMQ, FTP, Flat File, and XML. They are typical BizTalk receive locations that optionally use the Microsoft ESB Guidance pipeline components and the Microsoft ESB Guidance Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework for dynamic resolution of endpoints and metadata.

·         Off-ramps. These implement send ports for the delivery of messages using formats and transports such as SOAP, WCF, JMS, WMQ, FTP, HTTP, Flat File, XML, or any other custom formats. They are typical BizTalk send ports that optionally use the Microsoft ESB Guidance pipeline components and the Microsoft ESB Guidance Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework for dynamic resolution of endpoints and metadata.

·         Exception Management Framework. This includes the exception Web service, the exception management API, and components that enrich, process, and pass exception details to the ESB Management Portal.

·         ESB Management Portal. This provides registry provisioning, exception mediation, alert notification, and analytics.

What’s New?

This is the first CTP release of the Microsoft ESB Guidance 2.0 for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009. It incorporates several modifications and additions compared to the November 2007 release. The following list summarizes these changes.

New Features and Components

·         New samples. This version includes the following new samples:

o   SSO Configuration provider for Enterprise Library 4.0

o   Multiple Web Service Execution Sample

o   Exception Handling Service Sample

·         New ESB Web services. This version includes the following new ESB Web services:

o   Generic Itinerary Services ( no itinerary header required)

·         New core features. This version includes the following new core features:

o   Alignment with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 ( Beta )

o   ESB Configuration tool

o   Centralized itinerary store

o   Itinerary resolver components

o   Itinerary forwarder pipeline component

o   Itinerary selector pipeline component

o   Itinerary designer

o   Centralized configuration uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Configuration Block

o   Centralized caching uses Enterprise Library 4.0 Caching Block

o   Multiple service invocation using both messaging and orchestrations

o   Itinerary BAM tracking

o   Improved ESB Core engine and itinerary execution

Changes to Existing Features and Components

Modifications. This version includes modifications to the following features:

o   Resolver and Adapter Provider Framework. This version consolidates the Dispatch and Transform classes to support batch routing of messages within the Dispatch pipeline component using document specification type, and support for itineraries.

o   Itinerary caching pipeline component  This version uses Enterprise Library 4.0 configurable cache management.

o   UDDI Publisher Utility This version supports UDDI3 only with publishing endpoints using publisher-defined key.

o   General bug fixes.

Retired features. This version retired the following features:

o   None.

Enjoy!!

-Pat

 

Improve WPF application deployment with the Client Profile Designer

Sorry for repurposing content, but this one is easy to miss so I think it is worth it

“The Client Profile Configuration Designer is the designer for the .NET Framework Client Profile. It will allow developers to customize the end-user deployment experience. The customizations allowed using the Client Profile Configuration Designer are:

  • Customization of the user interface
    • Customize the size, position, framing, background colors, fonts, etc. of the installation window
    • Choose to display the license agreements required by the products being installed
    • Choose whether or not to acknowledge the end of the installation process or immediately launch an application
    • Choosing the products to deploy with your application
  • Choosing the products to deploy with your application
    • Choose what prerequisites are required by the application and install them
  • Choosing how to deploy your application
    • Application deployment can be done over the web or from Media for an “offline” deployment experience”

The Client Profile Designer was released as part of the WPF Futures release of the WPF Toolkit:

http://windowsclient.net/wpf/wpf35/wpf-35sp1-client-profile-config-overview.aspx

http://windowsclient.net/wpf/wpf35/wpf-35sp1-client-profile-config-part1.aspx

http://windowsclient.net/wpf/wpf35/wpf-35sp1-client-profile-config-part2.aspx

http://windowsclient.net/wpf/wpf35/wpf-35sp1-client-profile-config-part3.aspx

http://windowsclient.net/wpf/wpf35/wpf-35sp1-client-profile-config-part4.aspx

-Marc

Helpful walkthroughs, labs, and Expression Blend support for the WPF Toolkit

I’ve already blog’d about the WPF Toolkit & the WPF Ribbon Preview.  One of the things that may not be obvious, is how to get started with the new controls.  Buried inside the October 2008 Release page is a set of links for control walkthroughs, a nice Hands-in-Lab, and a helpful blog post explaining how to turn on Visual State Manager support for WPF in Expression Blend.  They are real easy to overlook.  I didn’t notice them the first time.  They are below the download links, after the release notes.  Yes, I am one of those guys that usually skips over the release notes and documentation and just starts tinkering.  I’ll never learn my lesson:).  I’ve provide direct links to those resources in case you missed them too! 

DataGrid Feature Walkthrough

DatePicker & Calendar Feature Walkthrough

Visual State Manager Overview.

Ribbon Feature Walkthrough

Hands-on-Lab: "What's coming in WPF: DataGrid, Ribbon, & VSM"

Visual State Manager in Expression Blend

-Marc

Microsoft launches BizSpark program for early stage software startups

We are proud to announce that Microsoft today launched BizSpark, an exciting new offering that will enable software startups to leverage Microsoft development and platform technologies to deliver Next Generation Web and Software + Services applications.

BizSpark offers early stage companies resources at no up-front cost, including:

  • Software:  fast and easy access to Microsoft’s current full-featured development tools, platform technologies, and production licenses of server products for immediate use in developing and bringing to market innovative and interoperable solutions with no upfront costs and minimal requirements.
  • Support:  professional technical support from Microsoft (MSDN) and community support from BizSpark “Network Partners” around the world who provide a wide range of support resources for software startups (e.g., entrepreneur incubators, associations, & investors).
  • Visibility:  global visibility to an audience of potential investors, clients, and partners.  Startups will have the opportunity to complete a profile in the online Startup directory (BizSparkDB) which highlights promising companies, including the “BizSpark Startup of the Day”

How to get started

In order to qualify your company/organization needs to fulfill the following requirements:

  1. Building a software-based product or service.
  2. Have been in existence for less than 3 years.
  3. Generate less than $1M (USD) in revenue.
  4. Be privately held.

Free software? What do I get?

  • All the software included in the Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System Team Suite (VSTS) with MSDN® Premium subscription
  • Expression® Studio Version 2
  • VSTS Team Foundation Server (standard edition)
  • Production use rights to host a “software as a service” solution (developed during participation in the BizSpark Program, on any platform) over the Internet, with regard to products including:
    • Microsoft Windows Server® (all versions up to and including Enterprise)
    • Microsoft SQL Server® (all versions)
    • Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server
    • Microsoft System Center
    • Microsoft BizTalk® Server
    • Microsoft Dynamics® CRM (coming soon)
  • In addition to the core program offering, BizSpark startups will be eligible for other Microsoft offerings, such as:
    • Microsoft Azure™ Services Platform

This information is representative and not comprehensive.  Products, versions, availability and additional benefits are subject to change without notice.  The current BizSpark program offering details can be found here.

Please visit Microsoft BizSpark and Microsoft Startup Zone for more information and to begin enrollment.

Cheers,

Patrick Svenburg

New SharePoint Guidance from the Patterns and Practices group

The P&P group released a new set of SharePoint Guidance today...Links below 

 

Quick Links

                     MSDN site: SharePoint Guidance

                     Future friendly url: http://microsoft.com/spg

                     Download: SharePoint Guidance – November 2008

                    Codeplex site: http://codeplex.com/spg

                    Community Forum: http://www.codeplex.com/spg/Thread/List.aspx

 

Guidance at a Glance

This guidance helps architects and developers build SharePoint intranet applications. The guidance contains a reference implementation (RI) that demonstrates solutions to common architectural, development, and lifecycle management challenges. This guidance discusses the following:

                     Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging.

                     Design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter.

                     Implementation examples demonstrated in the RI and in the QuickStarts.

                     How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.

                     Set up of development, build, test, staging, and production environments.

                     Managing the application life cycle including upgrade.

                     Team-based intranet application development.

The following areas are not discussed in this version of the guidance:

                     Content-oriented sites that use Web content management.

                     Internet and enterprise-scale SharePoint applications.

                     Multilingual SharePoint applications.

                     Scale or security testing of SharePoint applications.

Don't miss Web Platform Free Technical Training: Microsoft Live Platform Jumpstart 2009 - Register today!!

Microsoft Technical Training:  Live Platform Jumpstart 2009

Join us for a 2-day, free technical in-depth training being offered on Microsoft Live Platform. Live Platform is a cutting-edge, Web platform designed to enable you to build compelling consumer applications that attract new users and drive deeper engagement in your applications.

November 13-14, Washington DC

 

-Nandita

Free Coding Assistance Add-in for Visual Studio Developers

Here’s a little tidbit I picked up after watching the Microsoft Visual C# IDE: Tips and Tricks session at PDC.  DevExpress hass released CodeRush Xpress for Visual Studio.  From their site:

“CodeRush Xpress is freely available to all Visual Studio 2008 developers and offers a comprehensive suite of tools that enable you and your team to simplify and shape complex code - making it easier to read and less costly to maintain.”

“Supported Features

CodeRush Xpress includes the following features.

  • Duplicate Line
  • Highlight All References
  • Increase or Reduce Selection
  • Smart Clipboard Operations
  • Generate from Using (TDD)
  • Quick Navigation Window
  • Quick File Navigation

In addition, you receive the following refactorings.

Add Block Delimiters, Combine Conditionals, Compress to Lambda Expression, Compress to Ternary Expression, Convert to Auto-implemented Property,  Convert to Initializer, Create Backing Store, Decompose Initializer, Decompose Parameter, Expand Lambda Expression, Expand Ternary Expression, Extract Method, Flatten Conditional  Inline, Delegate  Inline Temp, Introduce Local  Make Explicit  Make Implicit, Move Type to File, Name Anonymous Method, Name Anonymous Type, Reverse Conditional, Split Conditional, Use String.Format, Use StringBuilder”

NOTE: I reformatted the list of refactorings to take up less real estate. 

I have been using this add-in for a few days now and I’m already loving the productivity enhancements I am reaping.  Go to http://www.devexpress.com/Products/Visual_Studio_Add-in/CodeRushX/ now and download it!  You can’t beat FREE!

-Marc

Silverlight 2 @ PDC

BB36 Building Search Driven Portals with SharePoint & Silverlight

TL07 Developing Applications Using Data Services

PC47 Expression Blend 2 Tips & Tricks

PC39 Inside the Olympics: An Architecture and Development Review

PC10 Microsoft Silverlight 2 for Mobile: Developing for Mobile Devices

PC29 Microsoft Silverlight 2: Control Model

PC11 Microsoft Silverlight Futures: Building Business Focused Applications

TL54 Natural Interop with Silverlight, Office, and Python in Microsoft Visual C# and Microsoft Visual Basic

PC27 Silverlight and WPF

PC35 Silverlight Controls Roadmap

 

Joel Reyes

Announcing Enterprise Library 4.1

Hi Everyone!

Our Architecture Patterns and Practices team just announced the latest revision for Enterprise Library!

Quick Links:

                    MSDN site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/entlib

                    Community Forum: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=119312

                    Community Extensions: http://codeplex.com/entlibcontrib

 

What is Enterprise Library?

Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges (such as logging, validation, caching, exception handling, and many others). Application blocks are a type of guidance encapsulating Microsoft recommended development practices; they are provided as source code, tests plus documentation that can be used "as is," extended, or modified by developers to use on complex, enterprise-level line-of-business development projects.

Goals for Enterprise Library

Enterprise Library is intended for use by developers who build complex, enterprise-level applications that are typically to be deployed widely and to interoperate with other applications and systems. In addition, they generally have strict security, reliability, and performance requirements. The goals of Enterprise Library are the following:

Consistency. All Enterprise Library application blocks feature consistent design patterns and implementation approaches.

Extensibility. All application blocks include defined extensibility points that allow developers to customize the behavior of the application blocks by adding their own code.

Ease of use. Enterprise Library offers numerous usability improvements, including a graphical configuration tool, a simpler installation procedure, and clearer and more complete documentation and samples.

Integration. Enterprise Library application blocks are designed to work well together or individually.

What’s New?

This release of Enterprise Library is a service release that includes the following:

                    Unity interception mechanism and integration of the Policy Injection Application Block with the Unity Application Block

                    Added support for generics in the Unity Application Block

                    Added support for arrays in the Unity Application Block

                    Performance improvements

                    Usability improvements to the configuration tool

                    Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 support

                    Bug fixes

For the detailed list of all changes, see About This Release of Enterprise Library.

Note: existing public APIs (v3.1 and v4.0) are still supported.

Getting Started

If you are new to Enterprise Library:

        read the Introduction to the Enterprise Library;

        download, compile and run the QuickStart samples—study the code;

        read through the related QuickStart Walkthroughs and “Key Scenarios” sections of the documentation;

        practice the Hands-On Labs;

        review the source and unit tests for deeper understanding;

        view webcasts on Enterprise Library and Unity, review demo code.

 

If you already know and love Enterprise Library:

        check out the change log for this release;

        upgrade to V4.1—no code change is required—simply update the references to the corresponding application block assemblies and to the common assemblies;

        download the updated QuickStarts and run through the Unity-integrated examples to get the flavor of new dependency injection style of using the Enterprise Library;

        review the documentation on how to use interception with Unity;

        view webcasts on Enterprise Library and Unity, review demo code.

 

Happy Coding!

 

Information on Microsoft patterns & practices

     Visit us at http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/ to see the full line of existing patterns & practices.

 

Happy Coding!

-Pat Weikle

PDC Announcements Log

To keep track of all the announcements at Microsoft PDC 2008, here it is:

http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/pdcnews.announcements//

 

Joel Reyes

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