May, 2011

This post is part of a series about WCF extensibility points. For a list of all previous posts and planned future ones, go to the index page . Message formatters are the component which do the translation between CLR operations and the WCF Message object – their role is to convert all the operation parameters and return values (possibly via serialization) into a Message on output, and deconstruct the message into parameter and return values on input. Anytime a new format is to be used (be it a new...

Three weeks ago we held our MIX 2011 conference in Las Vegas.  MIX is one of my favorite events of the year, and the conference always has a ton of great content and announcements.  All of the keynotes and breakout sessions from the event can be watched online for free here .  I’ll be doing a few posts in the upcoming weeks that also cover some highlights from it. ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update One of the announcements I made in my Day 1 keynote was the release of an ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools...

A few customers have noticed an issue with WCF scaling up when handling a burst of requests. Fortunately, there is a very simple workaround for this problem that is covered in KB2538826 (thanks to David Lamb for the investigation and write up). The KB article provides a lot of good information about when this would apply to your application and what to do to fix it. In this post, I want to explore exactly what's happening. The best part is that there is an easy way to reproduce the problem. To...

Install the Update Download KB2495593 and install. The update replaces SQL scripts found under theWindows directory: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\SQL\en C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\SQL\en Specifically, it adds some conditional compilation logic to SqlWorkflowInstanceStoreSchema.sql. Create a new Azure Database or use existing one Run using your choice,...

Earlier this week I blogged about the new ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update that we shipped last month.  In today’s blog post I’m going to go into more detail about two of the cool new features it brings: Built-in support for EF 4.1 (which includes the new EF “code-first” support) Built-in data scaffolding support within Visual Studio (which enables you to rapidly create data-driven sites) These two features provide a really sweet, and extremely powerful, way to work with data and build data-driven...

tempuri.org is the default namespace applied to WCF Services and Workflow Services.  You can and should specify your service namespace. It is recommended that you explicitly specify a name and namespace for the service contract, and an action for each operation to avoid using " http://tempuri.org" and to prevent interface and method names from being exposed in the service’s contract MSDN Library - Service Contract Versioning Where is tempuri.org in the WSDL? If you browse the service...

This post is part of a series about WCF extensibility points. For a list of all previous posts and planned future ones, go to the index page . We’re now entering the realm of the less used extensibility points for the WCF runtime. Operation selectors could well be left as an internal implementation detail for WCF, but for some reason the designers decided to make them public (I think the guideline back then was if anyone can come up with a scenario where a user would use it, then WCF would expose...

When designing a custom activity that can be used as a container for other activities, you may want to restrict the activity user to a certain set of activities. If the custom activity can only accept a single type, this can be implemented quite simply by setting the WorkflowItemPresenter.AllowedItemType or WorkflowItemsPresenter.AllowedItemType property. In this example, I allow only a WriteLine activity to be dropped: <sap:WorkflowItemsPresenter HintText="Drop Activities Here" Margin...

When I first saw NuGet I knew I had to find a way to take advantage of this great new way to deliver code to you.  It took a few months but finally the other day I decided to spend an afternoon working on a NuGet package for Microsoft.Activities.  Two and a half days later (isn’t that how it always goes) I produced packages for Microsoft.Activities and Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting How To Get Microsoft.Activities or Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting with NuGet Step 0: Install NuGet If...

Last week I blogged about the new ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update , and then followed it up with a detailed post that covered using the EF Code First and the new Data Scaffolding features in it. Today’s blog post is a continuation of this series and covers some of the new HTML5 improvements with the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update release. Project Template Support for HTML5 Semantic Markup The ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update adds support for you to optionally use HTML5 semantic markup when creating new ASP.NET...

or: best practices registering Workflow Activity Designers Getting your first custom Activity Designer to show up is not hard. There are plenty of samples to find. However, something mostly under-explained in such samples is that the way you get started with Activity Designers is not the best way to structure your code long term. For some of the same reasons, if you are an Activity vendor it’s also not the way we would recommend you would ship custom activities to a customer. What am I talking about...

ASP.NET MVC 3 supports a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine).  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code...

A few folks have been asking if it is possible to serialize/deserialize using the DataContractSerializer. Rest assured, yes it is possible. Now whether or not it is the easiest/most intuitive model well that it is a different question. If you read to the end the post you will see a bunch of extensions which have been pushed to webapicontrib and make this all MUCH easier (at least I think). If you don’t jump you’ll read below what you need to do if you do it yourself. It stars with the SetSerializer<T>...

We’ve recently published some great end-to-end ASP.NET video training courses on the http://asp.net web-site.  Created by Pluralsight (a great .NET training company), these video courses are available free of charge and provide a great way to learn (or brush-up your knowledge of) ASP.NET Web Forms 4 and ASP.NET MVC 3.  Each course is taught by a single trainer, and provides a nice end-to-end curriculum (from basic concepts to working with the new Entity Framework “code first” model to security...

Over the last year you’ve heard us talking about both Windows Azure AppFabric and Windows Server AppFabric.  Today we are adding our final post to the .NET endpoint team blog and announcing the new AppFabric Team blog .  This blog will be the home of content about all things AppFabric from Service Bus to Caching to WCF and WF. If you’ve been following us here on the .NET Endpoint please be sure to follow the AppFabric Team Blog . Blog Post by: Ron Jacobs

Next month I’ll be in Europe giving presentations at some great .NET conferences.   Below are details on the three conferences I’m presenting at: Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC 2011) I’ll be in Oslo, Norway for the NDC 2011 conference (June 8th to 10th).  I’ve heard really great things about NDC – I’m excited to be able to finally attend in person!  I’m doing a keynote talk, two breakout talks, and an unplugged Q&A session. Details on NDC can be found here . Microsoft...

The (awesome) UK developer community is holding another all day event with Steve Sanderson and me in London on June 6th.  The event is free to attend, and the venue will be in Central London (at the ODEON Covent Garden).  The website for the event is here . Content The event goes from 9am to 5pm, and will feature a bunch of great .NET content.  The current agenda includes the following talks: Build an app using ASP.NET MVC 3, EF Code First, NuGet and IIS Express (ScottGu) We'll...