Thanks to Jean-Sebastien who contacted me with this question. Imagine you have the following service contract 1: [ServiceContract] 2: public interface IBaseMyServiceContract 3: { 4: [OperationContract] 5: MyMessage CallAMethod( string correlationHandle, MyMessage data); 6: } Now suppose you want to create a workflow service which implements this contract using the technique I showed in my blog post How to make a WorkflowService implement a contract But to make it interesting suppose you want to use...

Today I’m starting on another spike project.  So far there are only questions to investigate, no answers.  I’m sharing my plans with you because I believe doing so might help some of you and I’m hopeful that you might share your insights with me as we seek to solve this problem together. But aren't you solving versioning in the next release? Why yes – if you saw my session at PDC10 – Windows Workflow Futures you know that we are working on solutions for the next release.  However...

Warning: This post is based on a prerelease version of the WCF Web API   In my previous blog post I showed how to add to and use the new WCF Web API a console application using NuGet. Now that works but it is far more likely that you will want to be using IIS and host the REST service as part of a web application. So in this blog post I am going to show how to do the normal thing   I Created an ASP.NET MVC 3 app to host the REST service. Not that there is anything specific to MVC I need...

I love Task<T>.  It has to be one of the finest innovations in the framework in the past few years.  Recently I was reviewing some old WCF documentation How to: Implement an Asynchronous Service Operation which was probably written in 2006 and I have to say that we can do a much better job of it with Task<T> so here goes my rewrite. Download Sample Code How to: Implement and Consume a WCF Asynchronous Service Operation with Task<T> Implement a service operation asynchronously...

Earlier this week, the first CTP of the Service Bus enhancements was released; the May CTP. This CTP was announced at TechEd and on the AppFabric Team Blog . One week prior to that, Codit has been accepted in the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) of the Windows Azure AppFabric team. In this program, we will work closely together with the product team to build our cloud integration offering. Being BizTalk experts since our inception, we are highly interested in this release of the AppFabric Service...

I’ve been part of several conversations over the past few weeks where someone posited the question: Now that WebAPI is out, how do I (or my customers) decide when to use it or WCF? This question actually has many different flavors? Is WCF done? Does WebAPI replace WCF? Should I stop using WCF HTTP? Why is WebAPI part of ASP.NET? Wasn’t WebAPI originally a WCF framework? If WebAPI is part of ASP.NET, why don’t I just use MVC? What does WebAPI give me over MVC?   Is WCF done? WCF is not done,...

In this post I will highlight what the different pain points are when hosting a WCF Service in Windows Azure with Service Bus Endpoints (e.g. using HttpRelayBinding) Including Microsoft.ServiceBus in your deployment As many people know already, the Windows Azure AppFabric SDK is not installed on Windows Azure. Which means that you won’t have the Microsoft.ServiceBus.dll once you deploy your solution to Windows Azure. This first problem is easily fixed by setting the ‘Copy Local’ property of this...

A recent customer engagement prompted me to share details regarding a comparison of the REST API’s used to manage the Windows Azure Queue Service and the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). As expected, these services both provide similar types of … More » Blog Post by: Keith Bauer

Some time ago I did a number of blog posts about the beta versions of the WCF Web API . As it turns out the WCF Web API team has moved into the ASP.NET team, a good thing as far as I am concerned, and as a result it is now called ASP.NET Web API . Now this is much more that just a name change. For starters there is very little of the WCF bits still involved, in fact when you use ASP.NET as a host none at all. As a result it takes on quite a few characteristics of ASP.NET MVC with convention over...

Alik Levin, from the Access Control service content and documentation team, has written these great step-by-step instructions on how you can use the service for federated authentication using Windows Live ID and Google accounts in your Windows Azure ASP.NET application. Read the step-by-step instructions, and find a number of great resources related to the Access Control service in these posts: Securing Windows Azure Distributed Application Using AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) v2 – Scenario...

I have read so many weird things about running a WCF service in a worker role using a BasicHttpBinding that the process might as well take its place alongside Nessie, The Yeti and the Lightweight Framework as things only some … More » Blog Post by: Christian Martinez

The EF team at Microsoft just release a first CTP of the EF 4.1 Power Tools making it even easier to do Code First development with an existing database. Guess it isn’t really code first in that case but database first   I did a quick test with an existing database, Northwind to be exact, and it worked pretty well. The only gotcha is you have to make sure the EF4.1 assemblies are available in your project otherwise you will receive the exception below. Adding Ef4.1 is easy though, just download...

Recently somebody asked me how a workflow could invoke another workflow that is loaded as XAML from a file or a database.  This is a common request so I’ve added an activity to Microsoft.Activities to support this. Download the Source for this example from MSDN Code Gallery – WF4 - How To Invoke a Child Workflow as XAML Scenario: Load an Activity from a XAML Text File and Invoke It Given A child activity deployed as XAML text in a file which will run to completion when invoked (no bookmarks...

Lately, a lot of CTP’s came available on the Windows Azure platform. My goal is to try them all out. I blogged on two of these technologies already: Using Windows Azure VM Role Azure connect - VPN as a service This time, we’re getting on the data side, with SQL Azure Data Sync. This data synchronization service is built on the Microsoft Sync Framework technologies. It provides bi-directional data synchronization and data management capabilities allowing data to be easily shared across...

By now most customers do understand that AppFabric Cache improves application performance by offering a distributed in-memory cache but often I get asked, what performance gains can be expect? The answer has several pivots, since one needs to first understand … More » Blog Post by: Jaime Alva Bravo

“ Task parallelism (also known as function parallelism and control parallelism ) is a form of parallelization of computer code across multiple processors in parallel computing environments. Task parallelism focuses on distributing execution processes (threads) across different parallel computing nodes. It contrasts to data parallelism as another form of parallelism.” – Wikipedia – Task Parallelism Can you achieve Task Parallelism with Windows Workflow Foundation? Yes… yes you can.  I know, in...

In part 1 I talked about a simple approach to combine WCF Routing service and claims-based security and I got some questions about the sample code and routing service configuration. In this post, I’ll explain some additional scenarios and would provide link to the source code. In my original post I used following very simple [...] Blog Post by: zamd

  Introduction   The Azure AppFabric Cache price for a particular size has three quotas prorated over an hour period, the number of transactions, network bandwidth as measured in bytes and the number of concurrent connections. The three price points … More » Blog Post by: James Podgorski

Having the ASP.NET Web API as a REST service returning data is kind of nice but to be efficient on the wire we don’t want to return more data that required only to discard it in the client.   As we have seen in a previous post just returning a collection data was real easy.   As it turns out changing the service so the client can filter data is almost just as easy. In the previous example we returned an IEnumerable<Product>. All we need to do is change this to return an IQueryable<Product>...

Have you deployed an app on Windows Azure? Would you like to possibly be featured in a case study, or get a cool “Powered by Windows Azure” logo for your human-facing site(s)? Well, now you can! Follow the instructions found here and you can get the logo. Blog Post by: Brian Loesgen