WCF tips

I’m currently reading Juval Lowy’s Programming WCF Services.  It’s very good on the detail of WCF, but (so far) a little light on tips for using it effectively.  So, when I stumbled across David Pallmann’s blog, I was intrigued to see that he has posted a series of tips about how to use WCF.  Here are the links:

1 - Service Interface Design

2 - Service Class Design

3 - Service Hosting

4 - Configuration

5 - Infrastructure

6 - Instrumentation

7 - Clients

I particularly like the suggestion of using an SOA thinfrastructure (partly because I like the word, of course) - i.e. to use as little SOA infrastructure as you can get away with but no less.  Buying all the bits of an SOA infrastructure that you think you might need before actually building any services is a recipe for pain.

Tags and categories

A new feature of WordPress is tags.  You could always categorise your posts.  Now you can tag them, too.  What’s the difference?  As you can read here:

"Categories are meant to be permanent, tags are ephemeral."

So now I can add extra information to my posts without having to create categories that I might only use once or twice.  Simple and effective.

Popfly

I’ve been experimenting with Popfly this weekend.  Here’s what I have learned:

• Popfly is an alpha invite only program.  You can request an invite directly and some members have invites they can bestow upon others.
• Popfly uses Silverlight 1.0.  If you install Silverlight 1.1, it won’t work.
• Writing in Javascript (and XML) is fun but hard work.
• You ‘ll want to download the SDK (the block building guide), which contains a really useful PDF that covers the basics.
• There’s an add-in for Visual Studio 2005 called Popfly Explorer that allows you to create Popfly projects in Visual Studio.  There’s a sample solution in the SDK.
• You’ll also want to look at some of the blocks that have already been written.
• Popfly is a baseball term that means a high fly ball that can be easily caught, apparently.

Let’s just remember that this is only in Alpha.  When it’s in full flow - with debugging, intellisense, .NET Support (including the IronLanguage family, I hope), shiny blue LEDS  and so forth - it could very well be incredible.

Transactional Messages

I’ve posted an article about transactional message processing using ActiveMQ and NMS. You can read it here.

Hurrah!

It’s taken a while, but I have a working installation of Orcas Beta 2 (Professional Edition.)  I used the snapshot feature in Parallels to revert to an earlier snapshot and the install went through cleanly.  Feeling on a roll, I’ve added Expression Studio, Silverlight Alpha 1.1 tools and SQL Server 2008 CTP (I had to re-run the setup for the workstation components of SQL Server 2008.)

Full time round-up

The second and final day of Mix ‘07 UK has come to an end.  I started today with a double helping of Visual Studio 2008 and ASP .NET 3.5.  These Scott Guthrie sessions were right on the mark: well-paced and full of content.  The highlights for me are the ability in Visual Studio 2008 to target different versions of the .NET framework and LINQ.

After such a good start, the next session was likely to be a disappointment and it was.  After lunch, however, things looked up again.  The session on IronPython and Silverlight was interesting, although I felt it could have been improved by focussing more on IronPython and the DLR and less on Silverlight - which received adequate coverage elsewhere.

The day was rounded off with Swaggily Fortunes - in which a lot of lucky punters won Microsoft branded socks - and Sneak Peeks - a look at some of the stuff that’s heading our way accompanied by the sound of a large audience playing bamboo recorders.  These sessions were a good way to end the conference.

All in all, two days well spent.  For those of you who couldn’t attend or who would appreciate a helpful prod to the memory banks, the slides and some videos should be up on the Mix website over the next week or so.

Update to Parallels 3.0

There’s an update for Parallels 3.0 available.  The standout out feature, apart from the reported performance improvement, is the integration of Coherence into Expose.  More detail here.

Half Time Report

The first day of Mix ‘07 UK has come to a close.  The opening keynote was a mixed affair (if you’ll pardon the pun) with a good story about the evolution of the .NET platform for application building punctuated by lacklustre demos - demos that showed some interesting functionality in most cases but failed to explain how or why the technology was used.  The last demo, by a representative from Sage, however, really hit the spot:  a little context and then some insight into how the technologies were used (in this case WPF and Silverlight with a little IronPython) and why.

Later in the day, I attended both of the sessions on Silverlight that Scott Guthrie did.  The more I see of Silverlight 1.1 the more impressed I am.  A cross platform CLR, plus the support for dynamic languages makes this technology really compelling.  It’s frustrating that we’ll have to wait a while for it to get to a 1.0 release.  It’s also frustrating that you need Visua Studio 2008 Standard or Professional edition to use Silverlight 1.1 - which means back to the drawing board for me and Orcas.

The day was rounded off with a couple of panel discussions, which varied in their interest for me.  There was some interesting stuff, such as mention of a .NET MVC framework to be released later this year.

I came to learn more about Silverlight, LINQ and the DLR.  On the first of those scores I have come home happy.  Tomorrow, I am hoping to find out more about LINQ and IronPython.

The Orcas Express

Having been unable to install Orcas Beta 2, I changed tack and tried the Express edition.  And you know what?  It worked.  I’d prefer to be able to install the Professional Edition, but I’ll take what I can get.  Just in time for Mix ‘07 UK…

Beta 3 of Windows Live Writer

Beta 3 of Windows Live Writer has been released.  You may have been able to guess that from the title of this post.  There’s more detail here.  Windows Live Writer has become my blogging tool of choice.  It’s Windows only - there’s a clue in the name - which is a bit of a drawback, but that’s what I’ve got Parallels for.