All posts by : BizTalk Blogs

1 of 493 | XM Radio Player Part II : Scraping - Just to make sure everything was as easy as it looked in Fiddler – I wrote a quick and dirty piece of throwaway code to see if I could programmatically  login to XM and play a stream of music with Windows Media Player. It was ugly, but …public void Can_Start_Media_Payer_With_Xm_Stream() { var cookies = new CookieContainer(); // step 1: get auth cookie HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create("http://xmro.xmradio.com" + "/xstream/login_servlet.jsp") as HttpWebRequest; request.CookieContainer = cookies; request.ContentType = "application/x-www-fo......

2 of 493 | An Alternative Queuing Model - Before talking about the new model for queued transports that we've added to WCF 4.0, let's first look at the traditional transacted receive pattern. Start a transaction. This can be relatively cheap although we'll have to pay more for the transaction once we actually have a resource (message) and other participants. Wait for a message to be available. If we don't get a message, abort the transaction we started and try again from the beginning. Receive the contents of the message under the transaction, removing it from the queue. Do some work inside the transaction. When all of the participants complete their work, the transaction can complete. A successfully completed tra......

3 of 493 | Aaron Skonnard WCF Screencasts - I mentioned a few months ago that there would be a series of WCF screencasts being published. Aaron has done a bunch of these, including putting two more up this week. Each screencast is a short, targeted piece talking about a particular topic on WCF. Hosting WCF services in Windows Services Calling services asynchronously with WCF Here are the previous ones if you missed them. Creating your first WCF service Configuring services with endpoints Hosting WCF services in ASP.NET/IIS Hosting WCF services in your own applications Creating your first WCF client Configuring WCF service references ...

4 of 493 | New and Notable 279 - First new and notable with the new Graffiti blog. WCF/Cloud Services Aaron has his latest in his series of WCF screencasts, this time showing how to host WCF services within traditional Windows services Aaron also has a geekSpeak webcast on Cloud Services today Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008 According to this post, you may start downloading the SP2 for Vista and Win2K8 today if you are either an MSDN or TechNet subscriber ASP.NET/ASP.NET Dynamic Data/ASP.NET MVC/ASP.NET AJAX/Silverlight ScottGu has his latest of super link posts on all the above Enterprise Architecture The latest Carnival of Enterprise Architecture is out Tools Brad Wi......

5 of 493 | RESTful .NET - My copy of RESTful .NET arrived today. In Jon's typical style, he dives right into the meat of the WCF 3.5 REST programming model and doesn't waste much time re-covering the basics. This is a great WCF-specific companion to O'Reilly's RESTful Web Services book. And I love the form factor.   Definitely a must have for .NET developers moving towards REST. Congrats Jon!...

6 of 493 | RESTful.NET - RESTful.NET, the latest book from my friend Jon Flanders , is now available at Amazon and O'Reilly . This book does an amazing job exploring the WCF-REST programming model and its relationship with other technologies. Definitely this book is a MUST READ...(read more)...

7 of 493 | Screencast: Hosting WCF services in Windows Services - In this screencast, I show you how to host WCF services within traditional Windows services. This is often necessary when you cannot use IIS/ASP.NET hosting for whatever reason or when you don't want to use message-based activation. In certain scenarios you want to ensure that your services are always running and that the host process won't be automatically recycled causing havoc on your underlying resources (think sockets). These are just a few of the reasons why some folks prefer this hosting technique in some cases. Be sure to check out our growing collection of short screencasts on our screencast landing page. Previous WCF Screencasts (RSS for all posts in the series) Creati......

8 of 493 | What I hadn’t appreciated about schema versioning in BizTalk Server - Most people know that when processing a message through the XmlDisassembler, if not explicitly told which schema to use through configuration, the disassembler would try to resolve the correct schema based on the message’s root node and namespace. Most would also know, usually through the experience of getting it wrong so many times first, that if more than one assembly contains the same combination of root node and namespace for a schema, the receive pipeline, containing the disassembler, would fail with the error  “Cannot locate document specification because multiple schemas matched the message type “<your message type here>”.” What some miss (ehm, ehm) is that this is not ......

9 of 493 | Average of Anniversaries - I haven't previously denoted an anniversary date for WCF because there are so many to choose from. There's the date we were done, the date that downloads were available, the dates when various versions of Windows Vista came out that put WCF into public retail for the first time, and so on. The anniversary of the average of those potential anniversary dates comes to around today but that feels unexciting as a way to select the day. I kind of like using the first day of public downloads so that may be what I celebrate next year. Last year I didn't need to worry about anniversary celebrations because we had just released Orcas at the one year mark. This year there has been no new rele......

10 of 493 | Important BizTalk RFID Links - Following are few key links to BizTalk RFID Resources Sites: http://www.microsoft.com/rfid http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/rfid-mobile.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb749758.aspx Microsoft Blogs: http://blogs.msdn.com/sudhir/ http://blogs.msdn.com/masimms/ http://blogs.msdn.com/krishg/default.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/kalyanaj Partners Blogs: http://developers.de/blogs/andreas_erben/archive/tags/Rfid/default.aspx http://developers.de/blogs/damir_dobric/archive/tags/Rfid/default.aspx http://blogs.breezetraining.com.au/mickb/ http://technicalmultiverse.blogspot.com/ Community Project: http://www.codeplex.com/rfid Vid......

11 of 493 | Post PDC Event Slides and Materials - DevelopMentor UK ran a one day post PDC event on Friday at the Microsoft Offices in London. Myself and Dominick covered WF 4.0, Dublin, Geneva, Azure and Oslo You can find the materials and demos here ...

12 of 493 | Screencast: Calling services asynchronously with WCF - Time for another screencast in the WCF screencast series. In this one you'll learn how to call services asynchronously with WCF in order to avoid tying up your main application thread for extended durations. You'll see how to configure your service references to support asynchronous calls, and then I'll show you how to write the async invocation logic. Enjoy!   Be sure to check out our growing collection of screencasts via our screencast landing page at Pluralsight. Previous WCF Screencasts (RSS for all posts in the series) Creating your first WCF service Configuring services with endpoints Hosting WCF services in ASP.NET/IIS Hosting WCF services in your own application......

13 of 493 | Calling a service without adding a reference in BizTalk 2006 and BizTalk 2006 R2 - We’ve been experimenting with calling ASMX web services from orchestrations without having to add a web reference (for the SOAP adapter) or use the generated items (for the R2 WCF adapter). The idea, in short, is to achieve increased decoupling between systems even in a web service scenario - Generally when you add a reference to a service in BizTalk 2006 or in R2 (although there are some clear differences between the implementation) the schemas for the request and response types are generated for you as well as an orchestration which defines message and port types using those schemas. When using the SOAP adapter the types generated are somewhat “special” and they encapsulate a little bi......

14 of 493 | Code for my book is up -   You can find it at http://www.rest-ful.net/book/default.aspx .  My plan is to have more REST and WCF content up on that site soon - but at least the code files for the book are there. Watch out for the code from Chapter 10 (consuming REST services)  - I created some code to use SQL Server Data Services - I haven't had time to see if it still works, but I will be updating it soon. Check out my new book on REST. ...

15 of 493 | RESTFul.NET in stock at Amazon.com and O'Reilly.com - My book on WCF and REST is doing - and SHIPPING! So many people have been asking me when the book would be ready - well NOW!  Code will be up this week (this of course I know will be the next logical question once people get their copies :)) Amazon O'Reilly Check out my new book on REST. ...

16 of 493 | BTSUG - Nov26th, BizTalk 'Cloud Services'- BizTalk in the Cloud. - BizTalk ‘Cloud’ Services – BizTalk in the Cloud With recent developments and BizTalk 2009 on the horizon, I thought we’d look at just what all these ‘cloud services’ mean and understand the term ‘cloud computing’ What’s cooking this month for the group? This month we have Scott Scovell (BizTalk Virtual TS) presenting on a very exciting new shift in computing – Microsoft Azure Cloud Services. You might be thinking – “What does this do for me?” Well....(far too much for me dictate here)...but imagine if you can: -       Connect seamlessly between clients and yourself (including firewalls etc) -       Swi......

17 of 493 | I'm a Free Agent - Available for Your .NET Architecture, Custom Dev, Agile, and SOA Needs - I have finished an intense two-month contract with ASP.NET and Castle ActiveRecord. I am now a free agent. Given my Agile background (from the beginning) and extensive .NET Architecture (since 2000), I can help your company get both the architecture and development efforts on-track. I also continue to contribute as a Microsoft CSD Insider (all CSD future efforts) and as authorized Neuron ESB re-distributor to all things connected and Service-Oriented. Want untangle your N-squared mess of point-to-point connected systems? Want to service enable your project(s)? Want to ensure that all such efforts with WCF and WF won't be wasted in the face of Dublin, BizTalk Server 2009, Windows Azure, ......

18 of 493 | SOA: Making the Paradigm Shift Part 11 of N - Welcome to the 11th article in the series.  Updated: Nov 23, 2008 In this article, I will take a broad detour from the abstract into the concrete with WCF. The title of this article is "Introduction to WCF: Architecture and the "ABCs" of Indigo." BTW, I have been in the Indigo SDR program for over 4 years and the term Indigo has stuck in my mind, so I will use the terms interchangeably. Plus, as I think Don Box said in a presentation," It's spelled W-C-F and pronounced Indigo. The WCF is silent." :) What is WCF in Simple Terms? The focus of this post is to show "Hello Indigo" code in a step-by-step manner. We will dive deep into the Indigo......

19 of 493 | Issues with REST Programming Code Zip on my server? Want it? Comment here... - One of my MSFT buddies pointed out, when trying to download my REST with WCF 3.5 sample code zip file from my server, that it was corrupt. I have replicated the issue but don't know what it is. The zip is valid on my machines but becomes invalid when I put it up on my Community Server. Meanwhile, if you want it, comment here with your email and I'll try to get it to you... ...

20 of 493 | Message Filters and Queries - Since a message filter and message query share a similar heritage, let's start by looking at the conceptually simpler message filter APIs. You probably haven't seen message filters before unless you've gone out of your way to explore everything that comes with WCF. They don't appear in the ordinary use of web services. A message filter is basically a matching delegate that works on WCF messages. There is not a lot of interesting message filter methods. public abstract class MessageFilter{ protected internal virtual IMessageFilterTable<FilterData> CreateFilterTable<FilterData>(); public abstract bool Match(Message message); public abstract bool Match(MessageBuffer ......

21 of 493 | Slides and demos from SOA/WF/WCF talk at Oredev - Thanks to everyone who came to my SOA with WF and WCF talk at Oredev The slides are here SOA-WCF-WF.pdf (278.79 KB) and the demos are here ServiceComposition.zip (107.08 KB) ...

22 of 493 | Screencast: Creating activities in Windows Workflow Foundation - My latest screencast in the Windows WF developer screencast series has been loaded up as of last week.  In this session, I discuss the basics of creating custom leaf activities including how to use Dependency Properties to make your properties bindable.     Endpoint Screencasts - Creating custom activities in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)     Previous screencasts in this series can be found on the screencast section of the Pluralsight website. You will also find short screen casts on other technologies both current (e.g. WCF) and future ("Oslo") on this page. ...

23 of 493 | Screencast: Using the WCF Send activity in Windows Workflow Foundation - My latest screencast in the Windows WF developer screencast series has been loaded up as of last week.  In this session, I discuss the basics of using the Send activity to consume a service from a workflow using WCF.    I extend the workflow created in the previous screencast to consume a service that authorizes credit cards.    Endpoint Screencasts - Using the WCF Send Activity in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)     Previous screencasts in this series can be found on the screencast section of the Pluralsight website. You will also find short screen casts on other technologies both current (e.g. WCF) and future ("Oslo") on this page.&nbs......

24 of 493 | Step by Step: Working with Content Based Correlation in Workflow 4.0 - Don't miss the screen cast video on this same subject available at Content Based Correlation in Workflow 4.0 Content based correlation is used when you send a message out of a long running workflow and need to get a response back later into that same workflow using information contained inside the original message.  In this case, the correlation needs to be stored and made available to match the response message. Content based correlation is easy to set up and use inside Windows Workflow 4.0.  At a high level you need to do the following: Create a Correlation Handle variable to use for the correction Set up this variable and xpath on the Send Activity Set up this variable ......

25 of 493 | Xbox 360 NXE - Forget Games, The Xbox is a Media Center - What's all this talk about gaming on the Xbox 360? I can't remember the last time I actually played a game on the thing, but I can say that both The Wife and I use it daily. I'd even say she uses the Xbox 360 more than I do. She plays music from the Zune and iPod, she runs photo slideshows for the boys and when we have company. Recently we had a party for my Dad and the Xbox was showing slideshows of him over the years with his favorite music running in the background. My wife and I didn't think anything of it (it seems pretty obvious to us) but oddly enough it was the hit of the party. A half-dozen people were literally freaking out. The Xbox can do that? Why You Should Buy an Xbox 36......

26 of 493 | I'm on MSDN's Endpoint.TV - During a recent trip to Redmond, I was interviewed by Ron Jacobs for his Endpoint.TV series. I had just been shown a bunch of new things, was full of excitement, and we had a great chat about models, clouds, workflow... all my current hot-buttons :) http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Endpoint/endpointtv-WCF-and-WF-40-First-Look-with-Brian-Loesgen/   Enjoy!   Technorati Tags: Oslo,Cloud Computing,WF,Workflow ...

27 of 493 | Speaking at SOAWorld 2008 - In a few hours I will be speaking at SOAWorld about REST and WS-* in the enterprise. The session provide a pragmatic view of the best practices customers are following in order to adopt the REST model in the enterprise and its coexistence with WS-* services...(read more)...

28 of 493 | WF 3.5 SendActivity with ChannelManagerService followup - Here's a short video on how to use the WF 3.5 SendActivity with the ChannelManagerService to populate named Endpoints.  It also shows how to "subvert" the SharePoint WF Runtime to add custom services, including the ChannelManagerService. Check out my new book on REST. ...

29 of 493 | What books should I buy for CSLA .NET? - As the Expert C# 2008 Business Objects book becomes available (now in alpha ebook form, and in paper by the end of this year), I'm getting more questions about what book to buy for different versions of CSLA .NET, and for different .NET technologies. (Expert VB 2008 Business Objects should be out in February 2009. The one unknown with this effort is how quickly the team of volunteers can get the VB port of CSLA .NET 3.6 complete, as I don't think we can release the book until the code is also available for download.) I do have a summary of book editions that is often helpful in understanding what book(s) cover which version of CSLA .NET. But I thought I'd slice and dice ......

30 of 493 | Controlling authentication with the WF 3.5 SendActivity - Someone emailed me a question about whether or not you can specify credentials when using the OOB SendActivity in WF 3.5 because they heard that you had to write a custom activity to accomplish this.  You do not have to write a custom activity.  While it is true that the SendActivity links to a named endpoint, and if you use the configuration file to configure your endpoint you can't specify specific credentials (a username and password for example),  WF 3.5 has a OOB WorkflowRuntime Service named the ChannelManagerService.  The ChannelManagerService (which I described in my article on MSDN - here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc626077.aspx)  all......

31 of 493 | Windows 7 Developer Guide released - Also on Code Gallery, in addition to the Vista Bridge, you can find an interesting bit of guidance for those developing Windows 7 applications. This is 43 pages of "what is special about Windows 7" written for developers. Curious about touch and multi touch? Ink? The new taskbar, ribbon, jump lists? Libraries? How to handle previews and thumbnails for your file type? Wondering what Windows Web Services are and how they differ from WCF? (quick answer - WCF is managed, Windows Web Services is native C++ - expect more on that from me when life calms down a little.) It's all in here, with plenty of screenshots. From here you will know where you want to drill......

32 of 493 | BizTalk vs Dublin - Do Not Get Confused - I was reading an interesting blog post today called Will Dublin Replace BizTalk? It got me thinking more about this and I wrote up the response below.  I would love to hear other peoples comments and thoughts on this.  I see a clear separation on when you would use BizTalk vs when you would use Dublin.  I see a great story going forward with both technologies working together.   I welcome comments and feedback on this.  Comment on "Will Dublin Replace BizTalk?" blog post: "I like your article on Dublin and BizTalk but wanted to comment on a few parts. As someone who makes a living working with BizTalk Server my ears perk up when I hear “it is g......

33 of 493 | Implementing EPC Information Services with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 - Recently Krish, lead program manager for BizTalk RFID wrote a post(here) on EPCIS capabilities in our upcoming release BizTalk Server 2009. Same time we have been working on providing guidance to our customers and partners on how they can extend BizTalk Server 2006 R2 to deploy EPCIS applications. The white paper on this topic has been posted on MSDN. Following is brief intro to the topic and link to detailed White Paper.  This goal of this document is to provide architectural guidance on how an enterprise can implement EPC Information Services using the suite of relevant products and technologies from Microsoft. As such, its audience consists of architects, analysts, developers, ......

34 of 493 | Live Search API "Silk Road" - Yesterday, Microsoft announced the release of Live Search services "Silk Road". Silk Road is Live Search's new set of search APIs (version 2.0 beta) and services for developers. With Silk Road, you can build applications without restrictions around presentation. Getting started is simple: decide what search content you want, choose from JSON, SOAP, or XML output, and then customize them according to your needs to build your own search application. All you need to get going is an AppID. The API is very thorough and will enable some very interesting scenarios as well as an opportunity to monetize your search results (as well as enhancing your site's 404 experience). Earlier this week I wr......

35 of 493 | The Future of WCF, Part 1 - It's been two years since we shipped the first release of WCF (codenamed Indigo). It was actually even a little before that that I started thinking about what features we should include in the upcoming .NET 4.0 release. The first time that I wrote down a list of features that I was targeting for improvement was the summer before, approximately two and a half years ago. There is always a period of time towards the end of a release where every addition is scrutinized too closely to add a new piece of work but the old pieces of work no longer require the continuous attention of everyone on the team. This is typically one of those creative periods where people are doing things such as t......

36 of 493 | 1 Question Survey on Configuration - Since I did the survey question on extensibility, I thought I'd do this followup on configuration. The two are often talked about together but have very different needs. Question: What's the one thing you would change about how configuration is done for WCF applications?Pick anything you want about the configuration format, tooling, integration with service code, or other topics as you'd like, but try to keep in mind that this is for an application that uses WCF. It's ok if the details of the change have to do with IIS or other products though. ...

37 of 493 | Biztalk Server: What's wrong with the UDDI Features of the The ESB Guidance Toolkit v1? - I spent some time today looking at Microsoft's Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance Toolkit, and this reminded me of an issue which we noticed a year ago, and did attempt to raise with Microsoft at the time, but which I never blogged about.   It's always a little uncomfortable taking the good people at Redmond to task, but, while this is hardly the most urgent problem facing today's world, it is, nevertheless, a bit of a problem and something which should be addressed. In the article, I discuss the problem, where the Toolkit goes wrong, how UDDI should be used, and a possible remedy.    The article is at http://geekswithblogs.net/cyoung/archive/2008/11/12/126975.aspx. ...

38 of 493 | Fluent Interfaces and Flowcharts - In a previous post, I talked about modeling flowcharts with C# code. The flowcharts are designed, documented, and standardized  by a non-profit  organization charged with measuring the quality of patient care inside of hospitals. They do so by looking at common cases that every hospital will see, like heart failure and pneumonia patients. The logic inside each flowchart can determine if the hospital followed the “best practices” for treating each type of case. Some of the logic becomes quite elaborate, particularly when evaluating the types of antibiotics a patient received, and the antibiotic timings, relative orderings, and routes of administration. Sitting down with 100 of pag......

39 of 493 | TechEd Developer 2008 - I had the pleasure of being in Barcelona this week for the TechEd Developer conference.  Highlights – getting to talk to several hundred developers about WF / WCF / Dublin /Oslo.  Lowlights – it’s Barcelona, what could be a lowlight? TechEd capped off the most interesting 8 weeks I’ve ever had in software.  In under two months we’ve had major iterations on virtually all the technologies that we drive in CSD.  It started out with a roadmap update on BizTalk Server where we provided some more detail  on BTS2009 and also talked about the next two major releases.    Next, we announced major updates to WF and WCF and introduced “Dublin”.  After tha......

40 of 493 | Screencast: Content Based Correlation in Workflow 4.0 - What is Correlation?  Correlation is when a process sends a message out and that same process is expecting a response to be returned to the same instance of that process. The complexity rises when the messaging patterns become asynchronous or the process becomes long running.  Asynchronous and long running processes are a common scenario inside business processes today. BizTalk Server is great at correlation inside Orchestrations given the publish and subscribe architecture of BizTalk Server. BizTalk supports both system based correlation (based on a Send Port or File Name) and content based correlation using specific values inside the message.  Content based correlation fit......

41 of 493 | 1 Question Extensibility Survey - WCF has a whole lot of extensibility points. Many of those extensibility points use similar systems for describing and installing extensions, but overall you still end up with multiple ways of doing extensibility depending on what you're extending. The Managed Extensibility Framework is a standardized plugin model for dynamically composing applications. If you haven't heard of MEF before, there's an introduction on the site, a short demo together with Visual Studio, and a longer explanation. These types of plugin frameworks seem to be increasingly popular as a way of extending the application development experience. Question: How would you expect a more uniform model fo......

42 of 493 | Modeling Flowcharts - A few months ago I worked on a system that was based on a set specifications that included some gnarly flowcharts (see pages 7 – 17 for an example). The good news was that the specs were concrete and readily available. The bad news was that the specs change every 6 months. I explored a number of options for modeling the logic in the flowcharts, including WF, WF rules, and code generation from XML, but ultimately decided on staying as close as possible to the flowcharts with C# code. Maintainability and testability were the keys to survival. The end result of building a flowchart in code looks like the following:var flowChart = new Flowchart<PnemoniaCaseData, MeasureResult>() ......

43 of 493 | Teched EMEA 2008 - I'm at Teched EMEA 2008 this week in Barcelona until Friday. I'm presenting several sessions on a variety of topics that I'm excited about including the Windows Azure Service Bus (part of the .NET Services layer), a first look at WF 4.0, moving towards Web 2.0 with WCF (primarily REST), and the WCF LOB Adapter SDK. If you're here this week, hope to see you in one of my sessions. I have some Pluralsight t-shirts I'll be giving away. Also, if you're interested in our Pluralsight On-Demand offering, find one of the Pluralsight guys this week (Jon, Brian, Ian or me) and we'll give you a registration card for a special Teched discount....

44 of 493 | New and Notable 278 - Oslo/M/CSD/WCF/WF/Dublin/.NET Services Doug Purdy makes the case for Oslo Dave Chappell takes a First Look at WF 4.0, Dublin, and Oslo Aaron on Introducing Oslo Aaron on Oslo and the Future of BizTalk .NET Services: MSDN Developer Center The Service Bus Bindings and WAS/IIS David Chappell introduces Geneva The Web Services Track Adding documentation to WCF Restful services with the REST Starter Kit Conditional Puts in REST Technorati Tags: Oslo,WF,Dublin,BizTalk,CSD,.NET Services,Geneva,REST ...

45 of 493 | Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference 2009 Call for Content - As you know, our next Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference will be taking place January 26-30, 2009 in Redmond, WA.  At this time, we’re still accepting session submissions and would love to hear your stories on how you are using a SOA & BPM solutions today to lower costs and achieve your business objectives.   Case studies describing best practices and lessons learned provide unrivaled insight and perspective from the in-the-trenches work that you are engaging in everyday.  We realize that our customers would rather hear from peers, which is why we have dedicated a majority of our sessions for customer stories.  Session submissions: Sessions are 1 h......

46 of 493 | Using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with the Windows Workflow Foundation Rules Engine - In this post, I will show how to use the Windows Workflow Foundation rules engine to provide business logic for a Dynamic Data Entites Web Application.  We will show how to change business rules without modifying code, drive the application based on a logical entity model, and map the entity model to a data store. I have to admit that I am in awe of how easy this was to do.  Create the Dynamic Data Entities Web Application To start, open Visual Studio 2008 with SP1 installed and create a new Dynamic Data Entities Web Application.  This will generate what seems at first to be a lot of code, but once you peek under the hood you will see that it's really just templating code......

47 of 493 | Tech Ed EMEA BPM Briefing Scheduled for 11 November 2008 -   Tuesday 11 November 13:30 -18:15 AC Barcelona Hotel, 3rd Floor (Attached to the CCIB) The Microsoft Business Process Alliance will be sponsoring a briefing on Microsoft’s Business Process Management (BPM) strategy, discussing how we partner with ISVs to build high value solutions, what developers need to know to leverage these solutions and reviewing a number of significant product announcements from the last 60 days.   13:30-14:45 David Chappell MICROSOFT AND BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT (BPM): A TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW What is BPM, and why should developers care? How does BPM relate to SOA? And what can you really do today with BPM technologies? This session takes a look......

48 of 493 | Screencast: Using the WCF Receive Activity in a workflow - My latest screencast in the Windows WF developer screencast series has been loaded up as of this morning.  In this session, I discuss the basics of using WF to implement an operation in a WCF service, or using WF as the implementation of a WCF service by using the Receive activity.  I show you how to use this activity to implement an operation processing the input parameters and returning the result.  In addition, I do a quick walk through of using the WorkflowServiceHost class to host the workflow service and expose an endpoint for client applications to call.    Endpoint Screencasts - Using the WCF Receive Activity in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)   &nb......

49 of 493 | WCF REST Starter Kit - Now that I'm mostly caught up with reporting on sessions from PDC, I'll start talking a bit about the future of WCF that we announced during the conference. The REST Starter Kit is actually something that is available now rather than coming in the next release of the framework. We had been thinking for a while about the state of REST support for the platform and decided to bring together guidance and samples for how to use this architectural style with WCF. The starter kit includes some experimental framework classes, Visual Studio templates, code samples, and documentation to better enable you to create applications in the REST style using WCF. Some of these resources are focused o......

50 of 493 | "Oslo" and the future of BizTalk Server - “Oslo” is a new modeling platform being developed by Microsoft that promises to simplify the way we design, build, and manage systems on Windows. Check out my last post on Introducing "Oslo" for more details. Because CSD also includes the teams responsible for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and BizTalk Server, it stands to reason that “Oslo” is related to these technologies to some degree. It’s also reasonable to question what future impact, if any, “Oslo” might have on your applications that were built using these CSD technologies. There are many similarities between the current version of BizTalk Server and some of concepts that “Oslo”......