All posts by : Sam Gentile

201 of 224 | AJAX may be the biggest waste of time for the Web - Daniel Cazzulino says "AJAX is OLD. It's been around for a decade. It's based on the techniques that exist almost since the web exploded: HTML, Javascript. Both have served the Web well. Both are bound to die.Seriously: do you really want to develop rich apps using loads of javascript, XML and HTML manipulations? Isn't that more or less what you have been doing for the past decade? And a decade in internet time is a LOT of time! I don't think the future of the web lives in HTML and forms and javascript. The future of the web should be fully inmersive 3D worlds where you can hang around, look at things, interact with other people/buyers, etc." A Huge Amen! I can't believe people are bu......

202 of 224 | How To: STS/Windows Authentication with ADAM/AD, Roles in AzMan with WCF - The last week I have been connecting up my seamless Single-Sign On with Windows Authentication scheme together with a Role Based System in ADAM with our Indigo Services and our Smart Client. Here’s what you need to know… First of all, these are the assumptions for now: Everything is in the same Windows Domain i.e. all clients and services (Expand to Federation later) or using Trust Domains Seamless Single-Sign On Use Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2003 R2 Use Active Directory but support ADAM for people that don’t have it Support WS-* standards Acknowledgements Robert Hurlbut for coming down a few months ago and helping on the Authentication part Of course, Steve who I pair......

203 of 224 | New and Notable 96 - Again another month and change since the last one so this issue will be a collection of everything marked in my Feed Demon box, some of it not so new-) Andy of the Pragmatic Programmers announces, " long-awaited Practices of an Agile Developer is now available from our website and from bookstores all over the world (the press release is here)." Martin Fowler has updated his classic Continuous Integration article A bunch of great posts from one of our best bloggers, Jeffery TDD Speads Up Unit Testing TDD Reveals Bad Class Design - Level 300 TDD Makes Refactoring Easy Writing Software is Too Easy; I think the general premise here is that writing bad software is way too easy th......

204 of 224 | Thank you Montreal and Ted Neward! - Ok, one last DevTeach post and then I will be back to posting about CAB, SCBAT and the new Services BAT drop. I am really amazed that I ended up #1 overall speaker out of about 40+ speakers (almost all tens across the board)! When you do that with legends like Brian Noyes and Ted Neward, its really amazing so thanks to everyone. Speaking of Mr. Ted, who has always been one of my idols, we put on an amazing combined presentation today where we combined our two decks. I covered mostly the SOA part and Ted the intro to Indigo. I held my own which was hard! Ted is so great a speaker. Of course, the highlight is when I got to serve as his Slide Monkey and learn the DM method of hitting the key t......

205 of 224 | Exciting! The Ted and Sam Show on SOA and WCF Tommorow - We had a problem tomorrow; both Ted Neward and I were at the same time with pretty similar topics here at DevTeach. We had my Advanced Service-Orientation with WCF Part 1, and Ted's Services Meet .NET: Win Communications Foundation, both at 1:30 PM. Not only did people want to see both of us, but it's also in the best interests of the attendees for us to not duplicate. So, Ted has graciously offered and agreed to us doing a combined presentation. Busy Developer's Guide to Windows Communication Foundation. I'm very honored and excited! I have done two panels with Ted but never a session. It goes without saying, that Ted is one of the people I respect the most in this field. Share this post: ......

206 of 224 | David Chappell on InfoCard - InfoCard is a very interesting technology that we are considering using as an identity management/single-sign on for our Indigo services as we see it getting some siginificant traction in banks already. David Chappell, one of the best technology writers in the business has this to say in his post, along with a whitepaper, "With Passport, Microsoft tried to create one identity system that could be used by many different people and organizations. While Passport wasn't a failure--it's used today by lots of people--the main thing Microsoft learned from it seems to be that a single-source model for identity will never suffice. What's needed is a way to use the plethora of existing identi......

207 of 224 | OT: In Montreal for DevTeach 2006 and Forgot Phone! - Sorry for this OT post but I am in lovely Montreal for the week for another year of speaking at DevTeach. I am very excited but I forgot my cell phone so fellow speakers if you need to contact me I am in Room 1415 or respond here and I will send you my email. Also, if you are an attendee, I would love to meet and sit down with you during the week. I am doing Hardcore .NET Wednesday May 10 at 15h00, Advanced Service-Oriented Design with WCF Part 1 Thursday May 11 at 13h30, and Advanced Service-Oriented Design with WCF Part 2 Thursday May 11 at 15h00. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...

208 of 224 | Latest Issue of Microsoft Architecture Journal Online - I find the Microsoft Architecture Journal full of excellent information and perspectives. The latest issue is online and contains Jesus Rodriguez's must-read article Explore Human Workflow Architectures. It doesn't seem like the whole issue is online yet so make sure you subscribe to the Print edition.Technorati Tags: Architecture, Software Architecture,   Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!...

209 of 224 | Truckin' Along with Iteration 19 and Indigo/Contract First with Services BAT - Well, here we are busy as hell in Iteration 19 of the project. As I said here, we are now on weekly Iterations instead of 3 week Iterations. I have to admit we have been sinners; we have not been using Indigo in a Contract-First or even Service-Oriented way. We have been sort of concerned with whatever data our Smart Client needs, making that available at the Service endpoint and creating a method-style RPC call. That's really bad. Its not even Service-Oriented; never mind SOA; its bleeding either service or client across explicit boundaries. We have not been using WCF well; we have just been using it as a glorified transport. I changed that today. I gave an hour and 1/2 presentation to our......

210 of 224 | Service Factory BAT is Tremendous - I started to work with the new Web Service Factory or Service BAT tonight, err this morning. I can see where this will be a huge help with designing and implementing WCF Services. For instance, take a look at my screen shot here of the GAT template for Creating a New WCF Service. This generates this second screen which shows the generation of projects for all the layers of the solution as well as things like Data Contracts, etc. This creates the following guidance: You have successfully created a WCF solution Actions performed: Solution structure created. Projects added to the solution structure. Corresponding references between projects added. Next Steps: Create the Data......

211 of 224 | Service Factory, nee Service BAT - I have blogged about the impact SCBAT has had with our project and CAB. Upon coming back from Redmond, we implemented SCBAT and saw a 6 to 1 cost and time reduction in completing user stories and tasks that involved CAB! I am really pleased to see Christian Weyer and others work with PAG to create the Web Service Factory, nee Service BAT. We have already downloaded it and see opportunities where this would be useful with utilizing best practices in working with our WCF Services. It leverages the same GAT technology as SCBAT and contains reference applications, "The Service Factory is a cohesive collection of various forms of guidance that have been build with the primary goal of helping yo......

212 of 224 | What Quantifies Good Software Design: Quality With a Name - My buddy Jim Shore has produced a very important article that, in my opinion, really moves forward the discussion of what constitutues good software design from an abstract sense to some concrete observable elements. What do I mean by abstract? When I used to hang around Ward's Wiki and the Patterns Community 1996-2001, I used to here the term QWAN a whole lot. QWAN means "Quality Without a Name", and it comes from the influential writings of Christopher Alexander in his book The Timeless Way of Building, which has had profound impact on the Patterns Community. It is supposed to describe good design as "elegant" or "pretty." Some might say it has "Quality Without a Name" (QWAN)--an ineffabl......

213 of 224 | New and Notable 95 - The last N&N was Feb 20, a month and 1/2 ago. I'm too busy being productive adding business value to our product to blog much considering I am still close to a intra-state move and dealing with the sale of one house and purchase of another. Meanwhile, the weekly plane flight commutes are just no fun especially after 6 months straight. David Cross, in the UAC group at Microsoft, has confirmed that the users accounts created on Windows Vista Beta2 will be standard users.  Yep, thats right...not an Admin, not a Protected Admin, but a standard user. Finally! I will still need an Administrator account from time to time though, which in the latest build I can't find, an......

214 of 224 | Syracuse NY Wednesday for SOA with Indigo - Just a reminder that our next CNY .NET Developer Group meeting is next Wednesday, April 5th at 6:00pm at New Horizons in East Syracuse (6711 Towpath Road ). You don't want to miss an opportunity to meet Sam Gentile, an internationally known and recognized .NET expert! So we can get an estimate of how many attendees we will have, please RSVP by logging into www.cnydevelopers.net and answering the meeting survey (or reply to this email). Here is why you don't want to miss it! Sam Gentile, internationally known and recognized .NET expert, will present "SOA/Indigo/WSE Overview" This meeting is sponsored by INETA, and they are providing Pizza and Soda!   Meet other .N......

215 of 224 | Vista and Its Effect on WinFX for Your Development - Andrew has posted a pointer to a succinct answer from a Microsoft employee on the very important impact of a recent timeline announcement on Vista and WinFX. Those of us who have dependencies in our products and our beta and ship cycles on WinFX have the right to ask tough questions as this could have a huge effect. I am not allowed to share any answers I have gotten for us with WCF/WinFX but Andrew points to a succinct public answer. Business customers will get Vista in Nov 2006. Vista will include WinFX. At the same time WinFX will be broadly available for download to all customers (and my ISVS) for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. A finished WinFX will not be made available......

216 of 224 | Toward converging Web service standards for resources, events, and management - Announcement: HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft have published a roadmap to describe ongoing work to reconcile and converge currently overlapping standards and specifications. The result will eventually provide an industry-wide set of standards for resources access and eventing that will be useful for many scenarios in management integration, manageability, and grid computing. ...

217 of 224 | Reminder of Blog Articles and Posts from 4 Years+ of My Archives - There may be some new readers that are not aware of my old blogs on samgentile.com, dotnetweblogs and radio back in the day. In short, I have been blogging and writing on .NET since 2000. Revisiting all this stuff it absolutely blows me away how productive I was in 2002 and 2003 - I write many megabytes of great stuff! This post attempts to gather my most popular blog stories and posts. Thanks for your readership. CLR, CLI and Rotor The all-time fav and classic from the "glory years" of .NET in 2002, "It's The Runtime Stupid!" (I mean runtime + framework, i.e. .NET Framework) A Night With Rotor and Rotor Resources, 7/1/2002 Ingo Reports on our Rotor Woes from Last Nig......

218 of 224 | CAB Smart Clients in an Agile World Part 2 - So I was going to show how to tame this CAB beast by sharing what I learned on that “CAB Spike” about a month and 1/2 ago. Again, the Spike is when you have no clue what you are doing, have to leave the schedule of User Stories to go investigate some technical subject, understand it, and minimise risk to the project! So I combined one of the CAB walk-thrus during the Spike with our code base to see if I could up with an Application Shell. Lets call our company Acme to protect the guilty. For me, CAB starts with the Module. What is a Module? Microsoft says, “One of the key goals of the Composite UI Application Block is to support the development of applications by using independent, but col......

219 of 224 | Implementing a Secure token service with WCF - We just did this at work. I came across Pablo Cibraro's post on Implementing a Secure token service with WCF and his is very similar. ...

220 of 224 | INETA at Drexel U Tomorrow Night Limited to 15 Philly.NET - I just found out that my Feb 23, 2006 Drexel University, Philly PA, Topic: N-Tier Development, at 5 PM is open to the first 15 Philly.NET people (non-students) that register at the Philly.NET site NET-Based N-Tier Architecture and Design Thursday Meeting: Drexel University Philadelphia, PA This is a special meeting held in conjunction with Drexel University MCS Society, the Microsoft Academic Alliance, and INETA. There is room for about 15 user group attendees to join the meeting at Drexel University on Thursday, February 23 from 5:00-7:00. Refreshments are provided courtesy of INETA. Please register on our web site. Come up 32nd Street from Market Street, the second building is ......

221 of 224 | New and Notable 94 - My apologies to my readers and my CodeBetter colleagues on one more link posting without original material. I still promise to have my CAB and Spikes post up real soon-) My Microsoft buddy Joe Stagner takes Stallman down a peg or two-) Chris Frazier links to a Microsoft hot-fix for WinForms designer issues. The WinForms designer has been horrendous for us. Everyone on the team experiences at least a 1/2 dozen errors a day with it unable to load forms (in the designer), sometimes corrected with voodoo things like starting up another certain form in order. Note: These issues are all in the designer Oh, I am so a Night Programmer! I agree Congrats to my friend Rob Howard and crew for shi......

222 of 224 | WCF and (no) Partial Trust - Via Doug’s blog, I learned about Partial Trust will not make the WCF V1 cutoff. I can say, having been part of the 2 year Indigo SDR, watching all the hard work, I believe Doug and Clemens that they wanted to do it, ran out of time, and “that partial trust is incredibly hard (and very time consuming) to test for a communication platform that is supposed to have rock solid security (no paradoxon here) and shall perform well.” I believe it all. However, the problem is that those of us who have gone with Indigo now have a big problem thats pretty hard to deal with. Full trust on Indigo forces most of the rest of the system to use Full Trust and that’s a real bad thing. My two friends, Robert a......

223 of 224 | WinFX Feb CTP Hits the Streets - WinFX Runtime Components WinFX SDK VS integration Orcas Development Tools VS Extensions for Windows Workflow Readme Shoot, unlike Jan, there are breaking changes in Indigo detailed here Now playing: The Doors - Bright Midnight: Live In America - Five To One ( Live Pittsburgh May 1970 Version )...

224 of 224 | WSCF 0.6 for Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 Released! - Christian just emailed me about the release of WS Contract First with these new features...