December, 2008

Time for another screencast in the WCF screencast series. In this one you'll learn how to call services asynchronously with WCF in order to avoid tying up your main application thread for extended durations. You'll see how to configure your service...

I'm very pleased to announce the publication of a new WF 3.5 hands-on lab to the MSDN Virtual Labs site: Using Test-First Development with WF . The new lab covers doing test-first development in the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) technology. The lab explains [at a high level] the concepts of test-first development, and walks the user through how to unit test both custom activities and full WF workflows. Unit testing and test-first development seems to become a very popular topic in the last...

I'm flying out later today on a pretty intense business trip (22,000 miles, 5 countries, 3 continents, 1 week, no sleep... :-), so my blog activity over the next week and a half will be pretty light.  To keep you busy till I return, here is the...

Last week I dropped a small teaser video to show a cool way to navigate through a SharePoint site, using jQuery to display a fancy animation. Today I've uploaded a beta version of the DockNavigation component to the SmartTools CodePlex project . So...

Thanks to all of you who joined me recently for Shannon & my seminar around Gaining Efficiencies in SharePoint . We had a great turn out and I hope you found it useful - we had around 60 mins....the clock was ticking. As promised - here's the...

I'll be geeking out today on this MSDN Web cast, where I'll be talking about Windows Azure and Microsoft .NET Services, and the impact they'll have on .NET developers in the years ahead. We'll be following the typical geekSpeak formula...

My copy of RESTful .NET arrived today. In Jon's typical style, he dives right into the meat of the WCF 3.5 REST programming model and doesn't waste much time re-covering the basics. This is a great WCF-specific companion to O'Reilly's...

In this screencast, I show you how to host WCF services within traditional Windows services . This is often necessary when you cannot use IIS/ASP.NET hosting for whatever reason or when you don't want to use message-based activation. In certain scenarios...

Microsoft® BizTalk® Server uses the SOAP adapter and orchestrations to receive and send Web service requests. The SOAP adapter enables orchestrations to be published as Web services and consume external Web services. Because configuring and/or using Web...

I have wrote a little about the BRE , and Microsoft is looking for customer experiences also here at this survey .

Today the BizTalk Adapter Development team announced a new whitepaper on troubleshooting the BizTalk Server Soap adapter in BizTalk 2006 and BizTalk 2006 R2 (although a lot of if not all still applies to BizTalk 2004). The download link is here. The whitepaper...

Consider a scenario where I want to insert data into two tables in a single transaction. The tables have a field that should be populated using the same sequence - one using SEQUENCE.NEXTVAL, and the other using SEQUENCE.CURRVAL, so that both tables get...

I just got my copy of Programming SQL Server 2008 - great book, I highly recommend it as the SQL Server 2008 reference for developers. Great job guys. Check out my new book on REST .

Last week I was teaching the U2U Advanced SharePoint Development course in Brussels when one of my students showed me a web part he had created. The web part showed a cool 3D chart (rendered with Adobe Flex ) based on some data coming from a SharePoint...

Uploaded new version of SSO Config Tool including fix for the browsing SSO Config Store application and some usability/UI improvements. Download source code .

I came across this a while ago and thought it's too good to keep quiet. The classic problem we've all been in "works on my machine" says the Developer. Basically this certification is easy - you launch the app, get to the main screen...

Just found the .Net Services Team blog entry where they explain that they are retiring the labs.biztalk.net stuff. I personally never quite got BizTalk.NET as it had nothing to do with the BizTalk product. Did anyone else ever get the correlation? Now...

You’re probably surprised that I’ve kept this up, aren’t you.  Here we are, five interviews into this series and still going strong.  This month, we chat with the one Flanders that Homer Simpson actually appreciates: Jon Flanders...

Yesterday I was hanging out at the Microsoft office in Los Angeles for an “Architecture Council” meeting on the new Cloud Computing platform.  You can find the slide materials on the Strategic Architecture Council blog. Overall, a worthwhile...

My friend Jon Flanders ' most recent book, RESTful.NET , is now available. Jon's a masterful instructor, always doing a great job explaining technologies to the masses. I'd highly recommend this book if you're doing anything with REST...