All posts by : Pluralsight Blogs

51 of 134 | XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. - This quote isn't mine, it's from the slashdot article on the Future of XML but I just had to reference it....

52 of 134 | XML: Done like a well-cooked steak - This recent Slashdot post on “The Future of XML” made me think about Ted’s post on Java and doneness. Personally (not speaking for my employer) XML has achieved Patriot-esque doneness (ignoring last Sunday's disappointment with the Giants). The format and data model stabilized ages ago (at least internet-scale ages). The standardization effort went into the errata/sustained-engineering phase years ago. Most development platforms have moved beyond the W3C’s first (and hopefully last) attempt to define programmatic interfaces. XQuery seems firmly implanted as a promising technology of the future. More importantly, XML survived XSD. Like Java (and C for that mat......

53 of 134 | Creating JSON-enabled WCF services in .NET 3.5 – an even simpler approach - If some of you were reading my post yesterday and thinking "forget this – I'm going back to raw XmlHttpRequest…", fear not J Ryan Dunn reminded me that WCF 3.5 supports an even simpler model for building script services than the approach I outlined – by setting Factory="System.ServiceModel.Activation.WebScriptServiceHostFactory" in your .svc file, you can completely remove all configuration file settings. In fact, you can reduce the entire service to a single file if you like by embedding the service class directly in the .svc file – here's a single file version of the WeatherService I posted yesterday: <%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Service="SimpleWeatherService"......

54 of 134 | Creating JSON-enabled WCF services in .NET 3.5 - Just over a year ago, I wrote an article for MSDN Magazine detailing how to make client-side web service calls with the ASP.NET Ajax extensions to .asmx web services. While most of the contents of that article still apply today to .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, there is a fundamental shift going on away from .asmx and towards .svc (WCF) for web services, so I thought it would be timely to post an update to that article to describe how to use WCF for your script-callable web services in .NET 3.5. With .asmx Ajax services, you create a class in a .asmx file (or associated code behind file), attribute it with the [ScriptService] attribute, reference the .asmx endpoint in the Services sectio......

55 of 134 | Geeks sharing recipes - So I'm a divorced father who cares for his three sons 50% of the time. It's a challenging but tremendously fun task. Since the separation, I've been spending much more time with my kids than I ever did before, and I'm loving it. But I'm still a geek at heart, and I hate doing clerk-like work to figure out what to buy at the grocery store. I'd rather automate much of this menial work so that I have more time to spend with my kids or with my work. My first step in my quest for automation was to find a program that helped me create shopping lists. I bought a copy of SimplyShopping, which has worked pretty well for what it does. What I like about this program is that it helps you print aisle-by......

56 of 134 | Announcing the MTPS REST API - If you've been reading my blog for long, you know that a while back I wrote the MTPS Content Service. And you've probably also noticed that as part of that experience, I learned a lot about SOAP and REST. Well, those lessons weren't just academic; for the last few months I've been working on the next generation of MTPS web services, and this time, they're RESTian!   As of today, you can go out to http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/restapistubs/ and see for yourself. That URL is the root of a prototype REST API that exposes basically everything that the SOAP API does, plus a bunch of other pieces of information. Over the coming months, we'll be adding more functionality to it, too, as we try out......

57 of 134 | Extending WCF with Custom Behaviors - My last Service Station column on Extending WCF with Custom Behaviors is online (it's actually been online for a little while now but I missed blogging about it with the holiday craze). Here's the abstract: Windows® Communication Foundation (WCF) provides numerous extensibility points that allow developers to customize the runtime behavior for service dispatching and client proxy invocation. You can tap into these extensibility points by writing custom behaviors that can be applied declaratively to your services. This month I'll show you how this process works....

58 of 134 | Java and doneness - Ted Neward has an excellent post on the state of Java. In general, I really like the piece a lot. I do think Ted slightly misses the point when he talks about Bruce Eckel's statement:     Arguably one of the best features of C is that it hasn't changed at all for decades. Ted cites C99 and D as flies in that ointment. I don't buy it. Just because a standards body can't recogonize done-ness and declare victory, that doesn't mean the fruits of that body have any bearing on reality. Go look here for evidence. The average C developer doesn't even know C99 exists and probably doesn't care. And as for D being so much better than C or C++, I would expect D to over......

59 of 134 | Where has Jim been? - I have clearly been away for a while.  This blog effectively shut down about 18 months ago.  For the last few months I've been trying to figure out if I should reopen it, and I set a date of Jan 1 to make that decision.  I've decided to attempt to return to writing entries in this blog.   So what happened?   At work, the simple answer is that I got extremely busy.  There was a 12-15 month period where I had a series of projects with very short term deadlines.  Almost none of them involved my normal day job (which also pretty much stopped for that same period).   At one level it was a pretty interesting period -- I got involved with teams and peo......

60 of 134 | Design and Implementation - Episode 1 - Update: I managed to mess up the permissions on the MP3 file, resulting in a few "access denied" errors. Ironically, I did this while trying to fix the Content-Type. Anyway, it should be working again. Sorry!   (For the impatient: link to episode 1 (MP3).)   For a long time now, Tim and I have called each other up on the phone whenever we have an interesting or difficult technological decision to make. The conversations have often been very interesting, and are in a large part responsible for the way I think about software. A while back, I was thinking to myself, "Man, we should record these - I bet other people would be interested in this stuff as well."   So we did.   Announcing the fi......

61 of 134 | Identity Framework Probable Feature List - Vittorio has just concluded a series of posts where he's sharing a sneak preview of the Identity Framework (Fx for this post). Based on what he's shown and his descriptions, I've put together a little list of some features we can probably expect from the Fx. This is all pre-alpha stuff and the API will probably change, but the core features being shown will probably be similar. These are a rather concise set notes that I've taken while looking over his code more closely. I created a wiki page to quickly hack up this list. Here's what it looks like now: Fx helps you implement a custom STS STS can issue managed cards (see below) Fx provides a base class for your STS, (it's currently calle......

62 of 134 | .NET Compact Framework WCF and Store and Forward Messaging - Webcast Follow Up - Thanks to everyone who attended yesterday's Webcast. BTW: You can now watch the Webcast On-Demand My apologies for the delay in getting the post-Webcast content released. Last night and today were one of those 24 hour periods that are just hard to believe sometimes. My wife and I both had to have unplanned dental work. I suddenly developed a problem with an existing root canal .. so I had to go in and start the process of doing a new root canal on the same tooth. Then my wife broke one of her molars today and was experiencing significant discomfort  ... to make things more interesting, her tooth broke while we're in the midst of a pretty significant snow fall here in New Hampshire (l......

63 of 134 | Screencast: BizTalk WCF Adapters -- Send Port Message Templates - This short demo illustrates how to take advantage of the message template feature made available by WCF send ports in BizTalk Server 2006 R2. ...

64 of 134 | .NET Compact Framework WCF and Store and Forward Messaging Webcast - Just a quick note to let everyone know that I'll be giving a Webcast this Wednesday (12-Dec) talking about Windows Communication Foundation as it's implemented on Windows Mobile with a focus on Store-and-Forward messaging. Store-and-Forward messaging is a .NET CF extension to WCF that significantly simplifies communication between mobile devices because it eliminates the need for the source and destination devices to be online at the same time. The sending device can send the message at anytime - if the receiving device is online, the device receives the message immediately; otherwise, the receiving device receives the message the next time the receiving device comes online. Please join me......

65 of 134 | PrincipalPermissionAttribute and Static ctor Leads to DoS - I recently heard a colleague lamenting that he was having difficulty using PrincipalPermissionAttribute at the class level in a certain scenario under WCF. I recommended caution in my guidebook, because of the nasty type load exception that you can run into if the first request to the class is denied by the attribute. Be careful about using this attribute at the class level. If the class to which you apply it happens to have a static constructor (or, even worse, if it may get one in the future), realize that this attribute applies to the static constructor as well! Why is this a problem? Well, if a static constructor throws an exception, the class is latched into a mode where each future a......

66 of 134 | Updating the Retry Activity - adding timed interval - Updated 11/29 - see below I recently created a retry activity that I've been wanting to write for some time now, and had a few features that I wanted to add. I was teaching a class a couple of weeks ago and took the opportunity to add a retry interval to the activity.  The activity is designed as a composite activity which can retry its child activities if it detects that a fault/exception has occurred.  Rather than retrying immediately, I wanted the consumer of my activity to be able to specify a TimeSpan indicating how long to wait between retry attempts. The simplest part was adding a property that allowed people to specify the interval.  private TimeSpan retryInt; p......

67 of 134 | MetadataExchangeBindings - WS-MetadataExchange is a wonderful thing. WCF implements this spec and provides support for it over several different transport protocols including HTTP(S), TCP, and named pipes. All you have to do is choose the appropriate MEX binding. If you're familiar with how bindings work in WCF, this all makes perfect sense. However, if you pull out .NET Reflector and begin looking for the various System.ServiceModel.Channels.Binding-derived classes, you might be surprised when you don't find any. I was surprised because when you specify MEX endpoints in configuration, there is a separate binding name for each supported MEX transport (mexHttpBinding, mexHttpsBinding,  mexNamedPipeBinding, and......

68 of 134 | Screencast: BizTalk WCF Adapters -- Send Ports and Action Mappings - This short demo illustrates how to configure a WCF send port to invoke multiple WCF operations by configuring an operation name -> action mapping. ...

69 of 134 | Build your own STS - During the last year, I've been talking a lot about security token services and how they can be used to factor out authentication and authorization logic from applications. But building an STS is tricky today because a lot of the plumbing you need to use is buried in WCF as internal classes. A team inside Microsoft has been hard at work building a framework to make building an STS much, much easier. And at TechEd Barcelona, Vittorio showed a sneak preview of what he calls the ADFS 2 Identity Framework, where you can get started building an STS simply by deriving from a base class that represents the STS. I wonder if this framework will support WS-SX from OASIS? (This includes a new WS-Trust......

70 of 134 | Screencast: BizTalk WCF Adapters -- Send Ports & Custom WCF Bindings - This short demo illustrates how to use a custom WCF binding via the WCF-Custom adapter in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 -- in this case I show you how to call a WCF service using HTTP and the binary message encoding. ...

71 of 134 | Visual Studio 2008 released! - Hot off the presses, you can get it now from MSDN subscriber downloads or the trial version.  See Soma's blog for more details on the new features, etc.  Surprisingly, being a WF and BizTalk guy, I'm least excited about the WF/WCF integration.  I'll talk more about what I dislike later, but this is a happy post!  I'm jazzed about the new web models in WCF if only because it provides a nice affirmation of the extensibility of WCF.  I might not like all of the details of how they have accomplished things, but the CSD team has certainly shown that WCF is a solid platform with all the extensibility hooks you need.  I'm also excited to spend some time with LINQ no......

72 of 134 | Screencast: BizTalk WCF Adapters -- Send Port Basics - This quick demo shows you how to configure a few BizTalk send ports to call a traditional WCF service using the new WCF adapters found in BizTalk Server 2006 R2. ...

73 of 134 | Microsoft Compute Cluster Server - My PhD is in parallelizing compilers, back in the 1990's when supercomputers were hot.  Then the field cooled off, as the machines were too costly, the programming models were too difficult, and the auto-parallelizing compilers failed to live up to (unrealistic) expectations.  But the field has come roaring back to life the last couple years, especially with cheap high-speed interconnects and multi-core CPUs.  Microsoft has a number of technologies in the HPC (high performance computing) arena:  Parallel LINQ, Task Parallel Library, F#, and Compute Cluster Server. Microsoft Compute Cluster Server, or CCS, is Microsoft's foray into the HPC cluster arena --- ima......

74 of 134 | Visual Studio 2008, WCF Service Libraries, and CTRL-F5 - One of the cool new features in Visual Studio 2008 is automated debugging for WCF service libraries. Simply create a new WCF Service Library project (using the new WCF project templates), press F5, and voila! When you press F5, Visual Studio launches WcfSvcHost.exe, a generic WCF host application that hosts your service library. WCF Service Library projects now come with an App.config file -- this is where WcfSvcHost.exe reads the service/endpoint configuration during initialization. A generic WCF client application (WcfTestClient.exe) is also started, and it communicates with your service via MEX to download metadata. It provides a generic mechanism for filling out the data required by ea......

75 of 134 | Demos from TechEd EMEA (WCF Adapters Deep Dive) - One of my sessions at Teched Europe was a completely interactive deep-dive session on the WCF Adapters. There wasn't one slide, only code, for 75 minutes. That's my kind of presentation! For those that attended, you can download the demo code I walked through here. Anyone else is welcome to it as well, it just probably won't make much sense of out of context. ...

76 of 134 | Silverlight 1.1 Alpha – An Appetite for Exceptions - The current Silverlight 1.1 alpha will eat exceptions. I’m not sure if the final version will behave similarly, but if you are working with the alpha don’t let this behavior surprise you. For example, consider the following event handlers that listen to a shape’s mouse events: void _box_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) {                 throw new NotImplementedException(); } void _box_MouseLeftButtonUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) {     _box.Width += 5; } The left mouse button goes down and … nothing happens. There is no indication of an error. ......

77 of 134 | Having one's cake and eating it too - Sam has an interesting response to my bitching about authentication. “I’d suggest that the root problem here has nothing to to with HTTP or SOAP, but rather that the owners and operators of properties such as Facebook, Flickr, and GData have vested interests that need to be considered.” Two thoughts: 1. If I'm happy to eshew WSDL and program native XML, am I being inconsistent in wanting a a better authn story “out of the box,“ which is what my allusion to WS-Security was implying?  Maybe, but then again, I like being able to treat HTTP as ubiquitous and would hate to have to build an HTTP stack for every application.  2. Do the vested interests......

78 of 134 | Lambda in VB - I'm starting to write more VB code lately. The XML support rocks. More importantly, a huge amount of people who use the technology I work on see it through that lens, so I'd be an idiot not to walk in their shoes as much as possible. I found the lambda syntax tonight. Dim f As Func(Of Integer, Integer) f = Function(a) a + 10 Very nice.  ...

79 of 134 | Yes Steve, I've Tried - Vinoski asks an interesting question: ...how many, if any, dyed-in-the-wool WS advocates ever seriously, honestly, and fairly looked at REST, actually tried it, but then decided it didn’t work and so willingly chose to go back to WS. I wouldn't call myself an advocate for any specific technology (ducks), but I've spent a lot of time doing HTTP stuff, including a recent tour of duty to help out on our .NET 3.5 support for REST in WCF. I have to say that the authentication story blows chunks. Having to hand-roll yet another “negotiate session key/sign URL” library for J. Random Facebook/Flickr/GData clone doesn't scale.  Personally, my dream stack would be ubiq......

80 of 134 | Speaking at TechEd Developers 2007 in Barcelona this week - This week I'm headed to Barcelona where I'll be presenting a talk at Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007 (EMEA) on server communication with Silverlight and ASP.NET Ajax on Wednesday Nov. 7. I'll also be hanging out at the Pluralsight booth in the exhibition hall. If you're going to be at the conference, be sure to come by the booth and say hi!  WEB314 Server Communication with Microsoft Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX   The release of Microsoft Silverlight brings opens a lot of doors for Web developers for building rich internet applications, including sophisticated vector graphics rendering, streaming video support, and seamless browser integration. In order to make these flashy applicatio......

81 of 134 | Demos from Microsoft SOA & BP Conference (WCF Adapters Session) - For those of you who attended my session (WCF Adapters Deep Dive) at the Microsoft SOA/BP Conference last week, here are the demos that I walked through during my talk....

82 of 134 | TechEd EMEA - I'm off to Barcelona in the morning, where I'll be speaking at Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007 (EMEA). I'm giving the following talks, both on Tuesday: SBP305 Introducing the BizTalk Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Adapters    This session introduces the new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) integration found in BizTalk Server 2006 R2. You'll see how the R2 release incorporates the WCF runtime into the BizTalk Server messaging layer through a suite of new WCF adapters. We'll describe these new WCF adapters, discuss when they should be used, and show you how to get started today. We'll cover the basic hosting and configuration options and show several concrete ......

83 of 134 | Demos from SOA conference (including RetryActivity) - If you attended my talk at the SOA conference on building composite activities, then you'll find the demos here.  I really liked doing this talk and it gave me a reason to work on a composite activity that I wanted to write for a while: the RetryActivity.  I started wanting to build this activity because when I teach people about WF and we talk about security on incoming data, there is always a question about how to handle failed authorization.  When the user fails authz on the built-in activities today, an exception is raised which I can catch and handle in the workflow.  The problem is that once I have done that catch, I close out the composite activity that caught the......

84 of 134 | Microsoft announces next big wave of products "Oslo" - I attended the Microsoft SOA and BP conference this week in Redmond where they announced their plans for future of connected systems (the division responsible for BizTalk, WCF, WF, AD, and much more).  You can read more about the announcement and what impacted products are on the Microsoft SOA site.  What I found most interesting is that this effort is not just about the Connected Systems Division (CSD) but also includes the Developer Division with the next release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, as well as the System Center products.  The close alliance of those product groups is something we don't often see from Microsoft and can only be better for customers a......

85 of 134 | Oslo - Sitting here at the Microsoft SOA & BP Conference...listening to the keynote. They just said it in public...”Oslo”. What is it?  A huge vision from Microsoft for a modern SOA platform. More to come....

86 of 134 | A few new Pluralsight T-shirts - Btw, we'll be giving some of these away at the SOA conference this week and in Barcelona next week (Teched Europe), so just find one of us if you want one....

87 of 134 | WCF Adapters in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Whitepaper - The whitepaper I wrote on the new WCF adapters in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is now available on MSDN. Abstract: Microsoft® BizTalk® Server has long supported Web services as a primary communication technique but the support has been fairly limited to date. For example, developers working with BizTalk Server 2006 can use the built-in SOAP adapter to achieve “basic profile” service integration or the downloadable Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 adapter when support for the various WS-Security specifications is required. But that’s as far as these existing adapters can take you in today’s maturing service-oriented landscape. Developers working in more mode......

88 of 134 | Microsoft SOA & BP Conference: What's New in Microsoft Connected Systems - I'm in Redmond today and tomorrow doing our 2-day preconference workshop titled What's New in Microsoft Connected Systems. If you're interested in the topics described here, we can deliver this content as a custom 2-day onsite course. The Microsoft SOA & BP Conference starts on Tues -- I'm expecting some interesting things to happen this week. I'm team-teaching this event with Matt and Jon so it should be a fun. Matt is up there giving his talk on WF 3.5 right now. Jon is up next with BizTalk Services, I can tell he's crafting up a killer demo as I write this. Sam Gentile is attending and he's been blogging about the sessions over here. If you're attending the conference, stop by one of ou......

89 of 134 | BizTalk Mapper/XSLT - Creating sequence number based on destination tree - When creating maps in BizTalk server, or generally creating XSLT transforms, you might run into a situation, as I did, that calls for you to generate a sequence number in your destination document.  If the source document and destination have a similar repeating structure, you can always use the Iteration Functoid or the position() function to create a sequence based on the source tree.  I recently ran into a situation where I needed to create a sequence number for the output records, but I was conditionally mapping the input records.  For example, I had a structure like the following for my source: <Invoices>   <Invoice>     <InvoiceDetail&......

90 of 134 | Demos from Heartland Developers Conference - I had a great time again this year at the Heartland Developers Conference (HDC) talking about extending WCF.  The guys did a great job of putting on a top notch 2 day conference.  It just gets better each year.  If you attended my session, then you will find the source for the demos here.  I'm headed out to Redmond next week for Pluralsight's 2 day pre-conference event on all the great technologies coming out of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft and then speaking on best practices for building composite activities at the SOA and BP conference on the Microsoft campus.  ...

91 of 134 | ROA vs GET/POST - Bill deHora has a great response to one of my (somewhat) recent REST posts. The timing is perfect, because I've been thinking a lot about what I said in those posts. I've also just finished reading the RESTful Web Services book, which is the most useful technical book I've read in a while, and have been thinking a lot about what it says too (and talking about it with Craig). I've been mulling over a post for a couple of days, and Bill's post is the impetus I needed to share what I've been thinking. In RESTful Web Services, the authors define and argue the merits of Resource Oriented Architecture. ROA maps directly to the REST-as-CRUD model for thinking of the world, where interaction with ......

92 of 134 | X-Rated Application - A client of mine who builds Windows Mobile applications for the medical industry, contacted me to help him track down a hard-to-find application bug. The symptom of the problem was that the app would occasionally encounter a ObjectDisposedException  ... the error occurred on only one client's device, was not encountered consistently, and was not reproducible in our development environment. (just the kind'a bug we all love) We knew the problem related to an area of the application where the user moves back-and-forth (in a variety of ways) between 2 non-modal forms but nothing more specific. After spending time reading through the code and my client working with his client to get a bett......

93 of 134 | Webcast: What's New for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2008 - Wednesday, 10-October-2007 - Maarten Struys and I are co-presenting a webcast on Wednesday, 10-October-2007 (which is probably today for most of you) that provides an overview of the new Device-oriented features in Visual Studio 2008 (codename: Orcas).  Here's the abstract for the webcast: What's New for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2008 With the upcoming new version of the Microsoft Visual Studio development system, device developers can make use of the many new features to develop applications for Windows Mobile powered devices. In this webcast , Jim Wilson and Maarten Struys provide a guided tour around the many new features in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 for Windows Mobile application developers. ......

94 of 134 | Hello, .NET Source Code - ScottGu announced that Microsoft is releasing the source code for the .NET Libraries. The cheering from developers won’t subside for some time. Reflector is a great tool for peering into assemblies, but nothing beats breakpoints and an Immediate Window for seeing what is happening in managed code. Developers will now be able to reference the implementation of production quality components. Using Windows Workflow as an example, a developer can use the base activity library and WF service implementations as a guide when extending WF. Looking at the design time implementation of various components in the presentation frameworks will also, I think, be a great advantage. Is......

95 of 134 | The WPF Book Fight Is On - Rory's cartoon portraying a 3 way grudge match between Petzold, Anderson, and Griffiths/Sells can now begin in earnest. I saw Ian and Sells' book at Barnes and Noble this weekend, so folks can now start to read in earnest. FWIW, I got the Zen from the Anderson book, but found myself going to Ian/Sells (or more likely Adam Nathan's book mainly because I had a bound copy of it) for details. My guess is that once I get a bound copy from Sells, it will become my go to book. On a wild tangent, how does the WCF book fight look?  ...

96 of 134 | Download BizTalk Server 2006 R2 RTM - The RTM bits of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 are now on MSDN Subscriptions! Subscribers can download the developer addition in several languages. Congrats to everyone who helped make this happen! There are some sweet new features in this version of the product...my favorite feature, of course, is the new messaging-layer integration with WCF provided by the suite of new BizTalk WCF adapters. You'll be hearing more about this from me shortly as I've been working on content in this area....

97 of 134 | Silverlight AG_E_RUNTIME_SETVALUE error - I've run into this error several times now when building Silverlight 1.0 applications with JavaScript, as have many of my students, so I thought it might be worthy of a blog post. The AG_E_RUNTIME_SETVALUE error occurs when an exception happens in the setting of a property on a Silverlight object, and the most common problem I have run into that generates this message is clashing types (a number was passed where a string was expected, for example). JavaScript a loosely typed language (or duck typed - if it walks like a duck, …), and will happily convert types for you implicitly without any explicit calls on your part. For example, this line of JavaScript does what you would expect: ......

98 of 134 | Hello Lisp - I believe it's a good idea to learn at least one new programming language a year. If nothing else, it keeps me from getting bored. You might think I'd choose Ruby, as that's pretty hot right now (in certain circles). And in truth I'm interested. I've even read some of The Pickaxe Book. But the language I've decided to devote my time to is Common Lisp.   There are a number of reasons for this. I won't go into all of them, but here are a few:   I've been meaning to really learn a Lisp for a long time. Probably since I took SICP as a freshman. (One of the more intimidating moments of my life: having Hal Abelson as a student in a class I taught. Really nice guy, fortunately.) I do a lot of w......

99 of 134 | BizTalk R2 class with Jon Flanders - As many of you know, Jon Flanders recently joined us here at Pluralsight.  In just a couple of weeks Jon is going to be delivering our first public offering of the BizTalk R2 class.  If I weren't already committed, I'd be at this course as Jon has some great material on the new features in the upcoming R2 release including the integration with WCF / WF and all the cool RFID stuff.  Be sure to check it out if you are using or plan to use R2.  ...

100 of 134 | The Failure of SOAP - It may seem odd to see the title of this post, seeing as it immediately follows one entitled "The MTPS Content Service - A SOAP Success Story". But it was always my intention to write these two back-to-back, because my experience writing the MTPS service was a major part of my most recent revelation: SOAP is no longer my default choice for writing web services.   You've seen some of this story already. I said I've been thinking like Tim for a while now. That thinking has really solidified for me over the last few weeks, to the point where I'm ready to essentially walk away from ASMX/WCF/SOAP in all but a few edge cases.   There have been three main ingredients in this solidification of my......