All posts by : Sam Gentile

51 of 224 | Parallel Computing and Concurrency on .NET - I mentioned back here that I was designing a Parallel Calculation Engine using Microsoft .NET. I actually am doing this as part of my team of three and we have learned quite a bit the last three weeks. For me, I haven't done much with just "straight" multithreading under .NET, by which I mean outside of WCF or outside of using BackgroundWorker in our Smart Client. Most of my MT work has been in 17 years of C++/Win32 and other places. So I went and relearned multi-threaded .NET programming as well as diving deep into the internals of Oracle for some of the optimization work we wanted to do (that should be another post). Let's just say, on the Oracle front for now, that Expl......

52 of 224 | New and Notable 176 - TGIF!! I am super busy right now designing a multi-CPU/multi-threaded Parallel Calculation Engine and diving into the science of Parallel Computing. I'll have some links when I get a chance. Windows Workflow Tomas talks about Silver, the integration of WF + WCF. The marriage is sorely needed because, as I have posted here, the current situation well, sucks. Silver uses Queues and bypasses EDS completely, which is what anyone needs to do to have any real success of communication into Workflows. Because we could not use Orcas here, we actually implemented our own version of the mechanism to avoid the hell that is EDS. Jon Flanders, the guy that helped me with the above, also worked ......

53 of 224 | New and Notable 175 - Temps near 100 F and 100% humidity make for some pretty uncomfortable days Windows Workflow Sometimes you have to go beyond the two root models of WF which are Sequential and State. We needed to and ended up using a hybrid of rules driven and state. Matt Winkler has a post with an ungainly title of Different Execution Patterns with WF (or, Going beyond Sequential and State Machine) How do I do this? Matt also has Implementing the N of M Pattern in WF Orcas Daniel Moth has a good post describing .NET Framework 3.5 and Brad Abrams continues CardSpace Michele has published her CardSpace CardSpace samples here. Very pleased to see Marc Mercuri, co-author of one of the best Indigo......

54 of 224 | New and Notable 173 - Slim pickings today. CLR/.NET Scott Hanselman provides advice on how to partition your app and figuring out the right number of assemblies/libraries WCF/BizTalk Services/WCF Dennis points out that he and John Shewchuk recorded a channel9 video that describes the why and what of BizTalk Services.  Its now online here: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=317646 Durable Instance Context sample (via Harry) Windows Vista Running a dual-monitor setup with Windows Vista Resharper/Software Development Tools Jeff Palermo found a hack to make Ctrl-N type discovery work properly (speed up!) in Resharper. Ctrl-N I am finding, is one of the keys to success with Resharper. Technorati......

55 of 224 | New and Notable 172 - Software Design/Agile/XP Ayende provides the substance and answers to Frans in the Working software over Comprehensive documentation and Documentation can be ambiguous in the most insidious ways. Since these posts substantially cover what I like to think I would say and believe  (and say it better), I'll let them be the pointers from my Writing Maintainable Code post as they pretty much say it all See also Ayende's earlier Understanding Bad Code WCF/CardSpace Rick Strahl on Hosting a WCF Service in a non-.NET Client Getting CardSpace Tokens Programmatically Technorati Tags: Software Design, Agile Development, Extreme Programming, WCF, Indigo, CardSpace ...

56 of 224 | New and Notable 171 - Acropolis David Hill's blog is here and the Team Blog is here One nice post on the Team Blog is Extending the Notepad Sample with a Web Browser View  Secret Themes in Acropolis Three New Acropolis Videos WCF/SOA/WF/Orcas Jesus Rodriguez on Orcas Durable Services Speaking of WCF, Steve details a really strange finding for both of us: that one way Indigo messages can block. I got the Indigo tracing turned on and it confirmed the results: closing the client proxy blocks until the one way message completes. Why? This seems to defeat the purpose of One Way Messages Harry rounds up the REST responses MAC OS/X OK, so two of my good friends dump Parallels for latest beta of VMWare Fusio......

57 of 224 | New and Notable 170 - Design Patterns/Software Design/Agile The Presenter First Pattern End to End, or, Another Run on the Hamster Wheel of Life Build your own CAB Part #8 - Assigning Responsibilities in a Model View Presenter Architecture Build your own CAB Part #9 - Domain Centric Validation with the Notification Pattern Put Code Where You Would Expect to Find It Tips for Testable Code and for testing legacy code WCF/Windsor Integration O/RM/LINQ Sahil presents his Views about the O/RM Space, Entity Framework and all such Stuff which quickly led to Ayende's post which has a great discussion in the comments Ian Cooper has a great post on LINQ to SQL and O/RM. Read it all The Language Integrated Quer......

58 of 224 | New and Notable 169 - Agile/TDD/Software Development MbUnit 2.4 RTM Rhino Commons, Repository<T> and Unit Of Work Setting up Windsor for auto registration of components Acropolis Brad Abrams has a follow-up post that has a lot more information including videos, links and tutorials As I figured, my friend Brad Wilson says it nice and neatly: CAB is dead! Long Live CAB! Glenn follows that up with what you need to know to migrate from CAB to Acropolis Dr. Nick from the Indigo team spends a few hours with Acropolis and has his impressions ASP.NET/Ajax/Visual Studio ScottGu has been doing these great weekly roll-up posts lately; Here's one from May 31st SQL Server Katmai Yes, there is a CTP alrea......

59 of 224 | What's Great about Being a Microsoft Developer - I'll be honest, this post has been real hard to write. I have been working on it all week on the train and it still feels really awkward no matter how I phrase it. It's hard to express because some of it is feelings and hard to put into a logical post especially one needing reason. So, based on my Microsoft at the Crossroads post, some may assume that I am ready to leave and fed up with everything Microsoft. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's like a relationship with your wife. I have had this relationship with Microsoft for nearly 25 years and it goes up and down, but the key is that Microsoft has enabled me to make a very good living and it's technologies have b......

60 of 224 | New and Notable 164 - Microsoft has definitely hit one out of the park this week at MIX. I have been talking with both Microsoft fans and "non Microsoft fans" and I have not seen this level of excitement in a long time. In fact, I think that this is the first time I have been excited about the CLR since the heady days of 2002 (more in a future CLR post)! DLR/Ruby/Silverlight/CLR And the biggest area where the "non Microsoft fans" are interested is the DLR and IronRuby. John Udell conducted a conversation with John Lam about the dynamic language runtime, Silverlight, and Ruby [via Larry] In fact, one of the people I most respect in CLI/CLR land, Miguel de Icaza was quite impressed. Alo......

61 of 224 | New and Notable 162 - Trying to get this one off before our weekly iteration meetingWindows VistaList of Windows Vista compatible Freeware [via IT's Vista] Windows Connected has a whole bunch of updated Vista BookmarksBizTalk ServerI am thrilled to see my friend Jon Flanders teaching a BizTalk Server 2006 R2 course SOAAccording to here, IBM too is giving up on UDDI and calling for a new SOA Registry Standard. I think its pretty clear that UDDI has failed outside of very specialized internal intranet usages ...

62 of 224 | New and Notable 163 - Special MIX'07 Edition - Given all the announcements and implications from the Mix'07 conference, I am writing this N&N attempting to capture in a list what it all means, at least what I think it means. I'm going to skip categories since the announcements span technologies. I already talked about the Cross-Platform CLR announced today. It appears that it supports apretty extensive subset of the BCLL including .NET Framework 3.5 like LINQ on BOTH the MAC and Windows. As buddy Drew Marsh exclaims, "WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can remote debug the Silverlight application running on the Mac from your PC using Visual Studio!!!!!!!"' You can download the following runtimes NOW: Micro......

63 of 224 | Getting Annoyed at Agile Correctness - As all of you know, I am a big time Extreme Programmer. My team runs under a full XP process. I have written hundreds of posts on it, blah, blah, blah. I call myself an Agile Architect. But lately, I find myself getting increasingly annoyed with my "own" community, even some on this site sometimes. The incident that broke the camel's back is the reaction to Roy's post on TFS of which he listed several features, that I myself have considered, even though we are a "pure" XP shop: The ability to associate a work item with a check-in action is very powerful in determining and reporting “delta” between failing builds Builds are also connected to checkin, and build h......

64 of 224 | New and Notable 161 - I finally did it. As promised yesterday, I shaved my head completely down to skin. I'm sure Raymond will be proud. IIS 7.0/Longhorn Server ScottGu announces that IIS 7.0 Ships with a Go-Live License. His post lists the numerous features that IIS 7 has in the recent Beta 3 of longhorn Server over those in Vista. I have been using Longhorn Server quite a bit the last 6 months and it is quite compelling Orcas/Workflow/WCF Jason announces that the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1 Framework available on MSDN for immediate download here. Mike Taulty starts to detail the changes in Workflow for Orcas Beta 1 and specifically WorkflowServiceHost, the centerpiece of WF/WCF Integration He also talks ab......

65 of 224 | New and Notable 160 - Trying to squeeze this in before yet another gym workout. As I have been talking about on my personal blog, I have really amped up my running as well as my weight-lifting programs. I joined a 2nd gym at work since it's cheap and on the same floor as the office so I work out every day. Also possibly on the schedule today is to get my head fully shaved not partial (yes all 3 hairs). Some of the following may be listed without commentary until later today. Architecture/SOA Nick Malik continues his excellent Architecture posts with Testing in an SOA World. I am interested in this topic, because being the "beacons of Agile" we're upwards of 1700 unit tests but what about testi......

66 of 224 | BizTalk Services CTP is Live! - I wrote vaguely at some past point, as did my friend Tomas, about these very promising "cloud" services that I had been seeing during the Indigo Orcas SDRs. I am extremely happy to see them out and announced. As I have said before, although there is a lot of very useful and cool WCF and WF stuff in Orcas, in my opinion, this is the biggest item of interest to me (its disconnected from Orcas BTW). The STS that I am very interested in, has become "BIzTalk Identity Services" and the Relay Service is now "BizTalk Connectivity Services". They also announced the ServiceBus and Workflow in the Clouds services that were demoed. John here talks about ESBs and their noti......

67 of 224 | New and Notable 159 -  Financial and BankingI work with a bunch of people that used to work in Collateral at ABN Amro, so it was interesting to see Mike's news that ABN Amro agreed Monday to be acquired by Barclays of Britain for 67 billion euros (nearly $91 billion), creating one of the world’s largest banksSOA/Software ArchitectureI picked up this link to Steve Jones' Enterprise SOA Adoption Strategies book from Harry. Looks like great stuff, I bought the bookDale points to Nick Malik's series of articles on SOA governance WPFCool! Karsten has a five day course for becoming one with WPF [via Chazz] WCF/Indigo/Identity Richard asks the damn good question, "Windows CardSpace: ......

68 of 224 | Philly Code Camp May 19th - Code Camp 2007.1 Via Bill Wolff, Day 1 of our third annual Code Camp series will be held at the Microsoft Greater PA Office in Malvern, PA on Saturday, May 19 from 8:30-6:00. Morning refreshments are provided courtesy of New Horizons Learning Centers. Lunch is contributed by RDA Consultants. Please register on our web site. Detailed directions are on the Microsoft Greater PA web site. Lots of code, just say no to slides! 8 hours 30 sessions (8:30, 10:00, 11:30, 1:30, 3:00, 4:30) 5 tracks 180 seats with tables (laptops welcome) Free breakfast and lunch  Raffles and prizes at 5:50 Easy parking Limited wireless Here is the official agenda, room assignment by letter [A, B......

69 of 224 | New and Notable 154 - Sitting here on Saturday morning with a nice cup of Kona coffee. There just is no better coffee in the world. Strong but deceivingly smooth. I really miss our former annual trips to the Big Island that we used to take with my Father-In-Law and family before he got ill. We used to go up in the hills and buy direct from the growers. Umm, nothing better. The coffee may actually help me get over my funk morning as there is now a lot going on my personal life but you know you never get to blog what really matters Agile/Extreme Programming/Tools While Steve was off having a baby, I went back into the team pairing full time for this Iteration rather than doing do the advance work on Workflow and ......

70 of 224 | New and Notable 153 - Its suddenly over 80 degrees here today and went off for a drenching run.Team System/Team Foundation ServerBig news of the day is that Microsoft has acquired TeamPlain, which makes the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team Server. Brian Harry says, "Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server and can be downloaded from here.  It will be accessible by any user properly licensed with a TFS CAL." This is great news as this is the #1 question I always get from people whenever I bring up TFS.I don't know if its a news item but together with one of my IT guys I started standing up a TFS server yesterday. Before eve......

71 of 224 | More Specifics on the WF Issue - I asked Tomas to expand on the details of the issue we faced last Sunday and it's this:What’s going is that you wanted to create a custom, reusable composite StateActivity-derived activity. While WF allows you to create an StateActivity-derived class, it restricts a bit what you can actually do with it.  The core problem here is that the way you wanted to use the custom activity was similar (in a fashion) to building a custom composite sequence activity. That’s because when you create such a one (like with Add to Project -> New Item -> New Activity) you have full design-time support for creating your composite, including being able to drag & drop activities in......

72 of 224 | CSD in the Cloud - CSD STS and Relay Services - As my good friend Tomas notes, the Connected Systems Division (the people that did WSE, Indigo, Workflow and much more) are doing some pretty interesting "Cloud" services. At the moment these are experimental services you can play with but they don't yet have any SLAs or assurances. If that turns out to be the case, it will be a huge step forward and I would jump on it on my project. What do they have?They have an STS: Security Token Service that is an open identity provider that integrates with CardSpace to provide an authentication service. Having implemented a bare bones STS, I know this is not easy work and mine is far from complete. I need to use SAML, WS-Federa......

73 of 224 | New and Notable 149 - Yup, I'm still stuck in Seattle and I still feel like crap. Tomas just went off to the airport and I feel like the last MVP left in Seattle. Just want to get out of here and home but can't do that until tomorrow night. Lots of stuff stored up Entity Framework/ADO.NET 3/ORM/ASP.NET/MonoRail I consider my (and all the Code Better guys) biggest contribution to the whole Summit has been our conversations with the Microsoft Data Team on Linq for Entities. I would like to thank the Microsoft guys for being so open to feedback and understanding us In the meantime, Ayende went and did LINQ for NHibernate in his spare Time; does this man ever sleep???? Actually the second proudest moment came some......

74 of 224 | Refurbished New Home Site - I have been working with the Office Live Services Beta for some months now. They just went live with my site over the weekend (although I still have to work on the domain name transfer) and it looks pretty good! I have a new Header and Home Page design. I have added my How-To STS/Window Authentication with ADAM/AD, Roles in AzMan with WCF to the refurbished WCF page. I added a new Domain Driven Design page under Software Engineering. My Presentations, as always are here. Hey, what else am I going to do while I am waiting for my flight?I would like and appreciate any and all feedback as comments here. What's good? What's bad? Knowing my blog and its subjects, what would you like......

75 of 224 | Windows Workflow 103 or WF Part 3 - Introduction to Workflow - In the last two posts 101 and 102, I went pretty deep in some areas. I want to step back and do some more tutorial stuff. So the first question out of the gate is what is Workflow itself and where might you use it? In a nutshell, a Workflow describes and automates a Business Process. It can be described as a "reactive" program which tends to contain some traits:Workflow declared as a set of ActivitiesCoordinates people and softwareHas real-world control flowRuns reliably and durablyTolerates dynamic changeA Workflow is typically designed by a Process Designer using Business Process Analysis, Modeling, and Definition tools. That Process Definition is fed into a Workflow M......

76 of 224 | Windows Workflow 102 or WF Part 2 - So, last time around, I left off at the issue about my struggles with the ExternalDataService that ships in WF and purports to be the general mechanism to get data in and out of a workflow. Harry responded that he didn't like EDS and that I get real intimate with the WorkflowQueuingService that low-level communication infrastructure that ExternalDataService builds on top of. I also heard from Matt Winkler in email who pretty much pointed in the same direction, emphasizing that EDS is an abstraction that sits on top of a pretty basic queuing mechanism that you can program against and build on. One is not restricted to HandleExternalEvent, ExternalDataExchangeService but I woul......

77 of 224 | New and Notable 148 - Still real tired from my Oklahoma trip, partying with Raymond sure is exhausting-). Agile/Development ToolsOn my short list for some time now, is to switch from NUnit to the definitely superior MbUnit. My friend Andrew has done some great work with this tool and he has a new release out with the beta 1 release of MbUnit 2.4. New features in this drop. I really need to switch and get my team to switch over. It's just been an inertia thing with NUNit as I knew all along MbUnit was better Testing private methods for .NET 2.0 rom Ben Hall. Database rollback support for .NET 2.0 from Cathal Connolly and Todd Menier. NUnit style explicit support from Graham Hey.Speaking of NUni......

78 of 224 | Thanks Oklahoma City and WCF PDFs! - Thanks Oklahoma City and especially Raymond for a great 2 days in the city! It was 76 degrees and I had a blast. Raymond was the best host a speaker could ever wish for and the group was great. One thing that is different from other groups is that they have both a lunch meeting (hour and 15 minutes) and then an evening meeting (2 hours). So I had over 60 people at the lunch meeting and then another 25-30 at night. I put up both PDFs on my Presentations page. The AM meeting I paired down to 22 slides, which for me is a record in conciseness :). I completely rewrote the long night presentation from all the other times I gave it last year and I put in all new material on Service Interface......

79 of 224 | First Experiences with Orcas March CTP VPC Image - So after two days of downloading at broadband speeds, I finally got all the pieces of the Orcas Mrach CTP downloaded. Doublce-clicking on Part1.exe expanded the other 8 RAR files. Once that was done, I used Virtual PC 2007 on top of my Vista Ultimate desktop OS. I left the setting at 1 GB of RAM. I then attached to the VPC image and there I was staring at a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise login. The VPC image seems to be put together well. In addition to Orcas (Visual Studio 9), both SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 are present. A nice bonus is that TFS is fully installed saving a lot of work. So far, I have just created a Team Project in VSTS/TFS and the speeds are ok. I just use......

80 of 224 | New and Notable 147 - Harry wonders if it has been a slow week. It started that way for me but its certainly not now with both work and the Orcas CTP release. I was getting so bored with .NET in general and even WCF/WF lately. Its really been a long time for me with something new. Vista is so one year ago, WCF too, etc. Last night/this morning when playing with the new Orcas bits was the first time I've felt that excited in months. The blogsphere has been busy to I think. Architecture/SOA/BPEL/Workflow The first piece of great news, from Harry,  is that Architect Extraordinary, Pat Helland has retaken the Red Pill! Harry rightfully skewers BPEL as, "BPEL is just the latest attempt at "write once, run anyw......

81 of 224 | It's Out!! Code Name "Orcas" - March Community Technology Preview (CTP) - I am really excited about this drop! Too many great things to mention. Get the installable bits here and the VPC image here. The page shows the very exciting Workflow and WCF new features. I'll have more to say as I play with them.Windows Communication Foundation and Workflow Foundation WF Designer and Debugger integration with Visual Studio WF & WCF integration: New WCF Send and Receive Activities Enhanced Workflow and Service hosting Enhancement to WF Rules: Added support for operator overloading Added support for the “new” operator to allow users to new up objects and arrays from WF Rules Added support for extension methods to make user’s experience calling exte......

82 of 224 | Sam Gentile INETA in Oklahoma City March 5th on WCF - As fellow CodeBetter Blogger Raymond notes, in his very gracious post, I will be giving two talks on WCF for INETA this coming Monday in Oklahoma City. The deck is being refined once again with my latest Indigo learnings especially as we deploy in Financial Banks. I also hope to have new demos, perhaps integrating with WF!Technorati Tags: .NET, Windows Communication Foundation, Apache Axis, Financial and Banking, WCF, WF, Windows Workflow, , Software Architecture, Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!| kick it! ...

83 of 224 | New and Notable 146 - Ah Saturday morning where we can sleep in, ah no wait...I have kids to wake me up at the crack of dawn... Software Architecture The PAG folks continue to deliver their goodness with their first weekly drop of the new version of the Smart Client Software Factory and they looked like they brought over some of the cool stuff from the Mobile version: What’s NewIn this drop, you have the first look at:• New Application Blocks. We have ported over four application blocks that were previously available as part of the Mobile Client Software Factory. We may refactor, remove, replace, this code in the future (we value your input), but we currently have the following:o Disconnected Agent Application......

84 of 224 | Windows Workflow 101 or 2 Months with WF - I don't really know what to call this post. I'm not as good as Palermo in doing 101 posts and I like to talk about the context and issues. And, I'm not just a pretty link-blogger so away we go :). Way back in October, I talked about Re-Hosting the Windows Workflow Designer in our application. So the version that went out of our baseline Concentration product went without any workflow. I have been playing the Agile Architect the last few months scouting out the WF territory to see if we could accomplish our workflow architectural needs with WF. The short answer is Yes. If I had to summarize my months with WF is that WF is very powerful and capable. But a lot of that power comes f......

85 of 224 | New and Notable 145 - Architecture/SOA Blaine Wastell has posted that PAG planning an update of the Smart Client Software Factory to be released in late April of this year. They are encouraging feedback at http://www.codeplex.com/smartclient and enter critical items into the issue tracker (http://www.codeplex.com/smartclient/WorkItem/List....). From where I sit, they have their Priority 1 stuff right with WPF Interoperability. We absolutely need to be able to move to WPF with the existing CAB/SCBAT infrastructure I have been listing posts on WS-RM and its implementation in WCF. Harry Pierson, has an autopost that  builds on his recent epiphany about WCF and long running services. He speaks about his ......

86 of 224 | Latest on Agile Project, Reorgs, and Interop - In a post on January 25th, I said, "I posted yesterday that we had shipped our Enterprise Collateral Management solution based on our new architecture. As I said, we still have a lot more to do." I provided a concise list of the methodologies, technologies and tools that we used in our 14 month cycle. To update where we are now, it will be necessary for me to give a little more context. First, when I mention "our company", we are actually a Division exclusively devoted to Collateral Management. This division, in turn is part of a much larger worldwide company that has at least 6 more financial sector products dealing with other aspects of managing risk. That company then, in turn is part o......

87 of 224 | New and Notable 143 - I spent my day off reviewing chapters from Michele's Indigo book and Steve's LINQ book. Meanwhile, my 4 year old daughter has fed our (expensive!) premium Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream we got at Whole Foods to Angus the Bulldog exclaiming "but Dad! He's a part of the family!" Data/SQL Server The big news is that SQL Server SP2 has shipped today and should make things better on Vista WCF Cool! Dr. Nick is starting a long series on Indigo Channel Development More stuff on Reliable Messaging in Indigo: Matevz has talks about the details of the implementation in Indigo. As he says Underneath, WS-ReliableMessaging (WS-RM) implementation is used. Click here for Microsoft's specification. William ......

88 of 224 | New and Notable 142 - Data/ADO.NET OrcasTwo from the ADO.NET team: Entity Client and Nulls - LINQ to DataSets Part 3Software Architecture/SOA/CABUdi answers, Can or should SOA be implemented without Web Services?David Chappell on The Three Faces of SOAEric Newcomer: WS-* vs. REST is not the questionAnother architect with a chronicle of How CAN and TDD helps doing better designsWCF/CardSpaceRichard Turner gives an insightful report on RSA2007 especially on the "demo showed Wachovia's website running on Corillian's online banking platform using Arcot Systems' security engine to generate managed cards and process token requests." Corrillian and Wachovia's work will be important for all of ......

89 of 224 | New and Notable 141 - Found some time to blog. Smart Client/UI ArchitectureV2 of the User Interface Process Application Block (UIPAB) is out from PAG [via Mike]. I must confess to being confused on how this is different than CAB as "designed to abstract the control flow and state management out of the user interface layer into a user interface process layer," which CAB does with MVP as well until I saw. "helps you write generic code for the control flow and state management for different applications types (for example, Web and Windows) and helps manage user's tasks in complex scenarios." Is it so you can do MVP in Web situations? So which do you use in Smart Clients and why? Softwar......

90 of 224 | New and Notable 140 - I haven't felt like blogging much lately. Some of that is due to how much is going on at work (much more on that when I feel like it) but I have also haven't really felt jazzed about blogging lately. I want to, and am starting to devote more time to get myself into the gym and my family, both of which have higher priority, of course. I should at least empty out my flagged items in Feed Demon as the size of the list drives me crazy-). WPF/WPF/Avalon My good buddy Walt wants to know "What are the Top Five Things you want to know about WPF/e?" He is speaking at several conferences this year on the subject, so if you want to influence his choices, head on over! Simon talks about the ......

91 of 224 | New and Notable 139 - Winter has finally set in with single digit temps and minus degrees wind chills but still no snow. WPF/Avalon Adam's WPF book is out and flying off the shelves apparently! I have been looking forward to this one as his COM Interop book is the bible there. Feb CTP of WPF/E! New Docs, SDK and QuickStarts for the above Via Mike Harsh, Dave has put up a new WPF/E sample he built for a recent INETA talk that is a Reflection Editor .NET 3.0 Crash Course - Part 8: WPF Conclusion Tim Sneath, from the WPF Team, has been doing a series on great WPF applications that is up to 6. This hopefully proves that WPF is more than some pretty 3D demo thing and being used in real applications. #1: British......

92 of 224 | New and Notable 138 - I have already said my piece on the Vista launch but also Office 2007 launches today which really rocks. The much better Outlook 2007 is worth the price of admission alone IMHO. Vista and Office Launches Vista Launch Page Bill Gates Keynote European Launch Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor Office 2007 Launch Page Nial Kennedy on launch in San Francisco Microsoft Debuts Vista in Global Marketing Blitz Robert McLaws posts on all those great Vista Updates that finally showed up last night on my Update. Can someone get me to stop playing Hold 'Em Ultimate Extra, my fingers hurt -) Software Architecture/SOA Pablo asks "CRUD Service for Service - Is a Bad Practice?" I think it depends, and a......

93 of 224 | Our .NET 3.0 Enterprise Application and Architecture Shipped - I posted yesterday that we had shipped our Enterprise Collateral Management solution based on our new architecture. As I said, we still have a lot more to do. Several people have asked and many have been interested in the continuing blog posts that I have had on our 14 month development cycle. This post is an attempt to organize several threads in continuing the conversation. Architecture Logical Three-Layered Services Application architecture Physical deployment to 1 to N Tiers depending on load, failover, customer needs, etc. Service-Oriented Architecture with all functionality designed and exposed as a Business Autonomous Services Presentation Layer Windows Composable SmartClient imp......

94 of 224 | New and Notable 137 - We finally saw some snow here but it was under an inch. Today, my team has a release party. After 14 months and over 80 iterations, we have shipped on top of our architecture an enterprise collateral management solution and deployed in a large bank in Paris and London and they have accepted it. We have a lot still to do in essentially building the full portfolio of products on the new architecture that we had on the very old COM based one of the past but today is a celebration! Windows WorkflowMark has updated the source for WFPad to work with the latest WF. This is a must have if you are doing WF developmentIntroduction to Hosting Windows Workflow Foundation   [via Harry]Provides......

95 of 224 | New and Notable 135 - WPF/AvalonOne thing I had forgotten about in Avalon is the XAML Browser Apps (XBAPS) sandboxed in the browser. Karen Corby has two posts here on features and the second on security levels. [Found via Lester's WPF Blog] One of the things I am looking at architecturally for 2007, is rationalizing the different code bases and development frameworks for UI (i.e. the grand convergence of the smart client and browser client). So in that, I would like to rationalize our WinForms/CAB code base and our soon to possibly be ASP.NET projects and have one WCF code base. So the question is; is it XBAPS or WPF/e? Walt reminds us all that there is no Cider goodness in the Orcas drop and "In t......

96 of 224 | New and Notable 136 - ArchitectureMore competition! No, I am very glad to see my good friend and Architect Harry start a series like mine and Mike's with his Morning Coffee 10. I'm going to have to quicken the pace-)Software Development/ToolsJetBrains has released their 1.2 version of their new CI and build solution, Team City. This is very intersting from three perspectives. The first is that Jet Brains arguabally makes the best Java IDE on the planet, IntelliJ. The second is the Extreme Programming/Agile angle in that Jet Brains has always understood thsi community much better than Microsoft/VSTS and this has been reflected in IntelliJ and now Team City's support of NAnt, NUnit, and many others. Th......

97 of 224 | Sam Gentile at Dallas .NET Users Group 4/12/2007 - I will be at the Dallas .NET Users Group 4/12/2007 on either WCF or WF. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!| kick it! ...

98 of 224 | Orcas Jan CTP Available! - Via Rob Caron, the news that the Jan CTP of Visual Studio code name "Orcas" is available for download as a self-extracting install, or installed in a Virtual PC image. Check out the Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" Related CTP Downloads page. That page has a whole list of mouth watering goodness of which I'll list some of my faves:Extended, more powerful data APIs with the ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to ADO.NET C# 3.0 Language Support: This CTP implements all of the C#3.0 language features from the May LINQ CTP including: Query Expressions Object and Collection Initializers Extension Methods Local Variable Type Inference and Anonymous Types Lambdas bou......

99 of 224 | Web Service Software Factory v2 (for ASMX and WCF) - More awesome news today on something we use on our project and I really love from Christian: It is here.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 ......