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