Today, I set off in a quest to refresh my memory and hopefully also learn something new about sockets, IP, TCP protocols, and so on. Which is quite a breath of nostalgia taking me back to COSC 231 Data Communications. Isn’t it great how when working with HTTP you can forget about nearly all of the low level stuff? Of course in my current state of C# dependency, the logical way to do this seemed to be to try to write some C# code, so (obviously) what better than to start learning about all the abstractions...

Today I was involved in a playful discussion about what would we do different about Workflow Designer if we could, and the question of ‘what do customers want?’ came up. I think there’s a lot that can change, but one of the ideas I can’t stay away from is improving Flowchart. For instance, searching the forums for threads about FlowDecision turns up a surprising number of posts by people who want to customize FlowDecision and replace it with something a little bit different. So, here are my open...

I’m excited to announce a new capability we are adding to Windows Azure today: Windows Azure Mobile Services Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it incredibly easy to connect a scalable cloud backend to your client and mobile applications.  It allows you to easily store structured data in the cloud that can span both devices and users, integrate it with user authentication, as well as send out updates to clients via push notifications. Today’s release enables you to add these capabilities to...

Earlier this year we announced Windows Azure Media Services . Windows Azure Media Services is a cloud-based PaaS solution that enables you to efficiently build and deliver media solutions to customers. It offers a bunch of ready-to-use services that enable the fast ingestion, encoding, format-conversion, storage, content protection, and streaming (both live and on-demand) of video.  Windows Azure Media Services can be used to deliver solutions to any device or client - including HTML5, Silverlight...

I’ve gotten a few questions about AppFabric for Windows Server, so I’d like to share some thoughts on the topic, specifically on the Workflow management aspects of AppFabric Server. First, it’s important to clarify what AppFabric Server is/isn’t, since I’ve seen some confusion on this. Simply put, AppFabric provides a set of extensions for IIS-hosted workflows. With .NET 4, we added support for “WCF Workflows Services”, workflows that you can call as WCF...

I mentioned in the previous post that one of our key investments has been supporting the new workflow model in SharePoint 2013 , which is now available in Preview form. To accomplish this, we have been developing the “Workflow Manager”. As the name implies Workflow Manager provides a hosting and management solution for workflows, built on the Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5. Workflow Manager will be a general purpose technology, but the schedule and features for the first release...

We’ve been making significant investments in Workflow since the release of .NET 4, and now that we're starting to wrap up some of these investments, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a summary. The work falls into 3 major areas: Improvements in Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012, which has just reached RTM ! Enhancements for running Windows Workflow Foundation in Azure Support for the new workflow capabilities in SharePoint 2013 and the next version...

Tomorrow, Friday August 10th, I’m doing another online LIDNUG session .  The talk will be from 2pm to 3:30pm (Pacific Time).  I do these talks a few times a year and they tend to be pretty fun.  Attendees can ask any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting.  We usually end up having some really good discussions on a wide variety of topics.  Any topic or question is fair game. You can learn more and register to attend the online event for...

This small utility can download SharePoint Solution packages uploaded to SharePoint. I have updated it for SharePoint 2013 beta; we now have a version for SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013.   Blog Post by: sergeluca

Slightly off-topic, but a friend of mine posted a video on Facebook that struck me as being very relevant to our space.    At the same time I saw this, another friend and co-worker was having a fairly crummy day with lots of crazy meetings and requests from co-workers, but that day was made a lot better by sitting down and solving a fun little deployment script problem.  The deployment script is neither here nor there, it was more that so many of the folks in this industry love solving...

Scott Guthrie has a new blog post which highlights our work to support the new model for SharePoint apps and workflows in SharePoint 2013 and the next version of Office 365. You can find more on SharePoint 2013 workflows, which are based on WF 4.5, on MSDN here . Blog Post by: Jurgen Willis

Question Can I use a LINQ Query such as the following in a Workflow? private static void ShowQueryWithCode(IEnumerable< string > names) { Console.WriteLine( "Linq Query in Code - show names that start with 'R'" ); // Assuming there are no null entries in the names collection var query = from name in names where name.StartsWith( "R" ) select name; // This is the same thing as // var query = names.Where(name => name.StartsWith("R")); foreach (var name...

One of our long-time MVPs, Rick Garibay, and one of our DPE evangelists, Hammad Rajjoub, have just released their new book, Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook . If you’re building your WF4 workflows as WCF SOAP services and running in WorkflowServiceHost, then IIS is a natural place to host these workflows. If you’re hosting in IIS, then you should certainly take a look at the IIS extensions provided by Windows Server AppFabric. With this book, Rick and Hammad have created a...

Last week’s Beta release of Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint introduced several great enhancements, including a bunch of developer improvements.  Developers can now extend SharePoint by creating web apps using ASP.NET (both ASP.NET Web Forms and now ASP.NET MVC), as well as extend SharePoint by authoring custom workflows using the new Workflow Framework in .NET 4.5. Even better, the web and workflow apps that developers create to extend SharePoint can now be hosted on Windows Azure. ...

1.The User Interface is more or less the same : the ribbon still plays an important role and Central Admin is pretty similar. However we can leverage the metro UI. 2.The architecture is very similar to SharePoint 2010 : farm, web app, site collections, sites, services apps, jobs,…; many improvements, but basically the same architecture. [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

MOSS 2007 & WSS Code (packaged in .wsp files) is supposed to run in full trust mode on the server SharePoint 2010 & SharePoint Foundation 2010 code (packaged in .wsp files) can run on the server in full trust mode, on the server in partial trust mode (sandbox , uploaded by a site collection administrator), [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

I had a little bit of time on my hand and wanted to whip up a quick sample using PowerShell for a Hadoop job. This uses the Hadoop streaming capability, which essentially allows for mappers and reducers to be written as arbitrary executables that operate on standard input and output. The .ps1 scripts are pretty simple, these operate over a set of airline data that looks like this: 0,EV,18,0,MIA,2011-12-18T00:00:00,12,TPA,1227859,2011 0,EV,17,0,MIA,2011-12-17T00:00:00,12,TPA,1227860,2011 6,EV,17,4...

The Entity Framework has advanced significantly over the last few years. A little over a year ago we released EF 4.1 , which introduced the new DbContext API and EF “Code First” support.  Earlier this year we delivered EF 4.3 , which provides Code First Migration support that enables developers to easily evolve database schema in a code optimized way.  And we are now in the final stages of wrapping up the EF 5 release , which adds enum support, spatial data types, table-valued function...

  It looks like everybody in the planet is aware that Office 2013 and SharePoint 2010 Preview are available this week and can be downloaded here and here . I had the opportunity to watch the live announcement from the Microsoft France Offices this week. You will find plenty of posts describing many features of [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

Dropping the stealth cloak a little, it’s time for some personal news about what I’ve been up to for the last year and a bit. And the answer is? Testing what we are calling in our docs “Workflow 1.0 Beta” (name may change) which is Microsoft’s new Workflow hosting product. Here’s a few quick facts about this piece of software. What is this? “Workflow 1.0 Beta” is a separate piece of software being released alongside the Office 2013 Beta, but also a requirement for enabling some of Office’s Sharepoint...