Pluralsight's weekly WF/WCF screencast series is now part of a new Channel9 show dedicated to these technologies — it's called the "Endpoint" show and you can find it at http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Endpoint/. The show alternates between WCF and WF topics every four episodes, and is posted weekly on Weds mornings (8am Pacific) – so check it out regularly if you're interested in these technologies.
In this week's screencast, I demonstrate how to host WCF services in your own application processes such as a Windows service, a Windows UI application, or even something like a console application. This is a more advanced topic that you'll need to understand when including a WCF service in any code running outside of IIS/ASP.NET. For more info on hosting WCF services within ASP.NET/IIS, check out last week's screencast. Enjoy.
Previous Screencasts (RSS for all posts in the series)
If you have any responsibility for planning or maintaining BizTalk Server databases, I highly encourage you to check out the brand new Microsoft Knowledge Base article entitled How to maintain and troubleshoot BizTalk Server databases.
The article contains details on SQL Server instance settings, the SQL Server Agent jobs, handling deadlocks, how to delete data […]
Canada’s Connected Systems Road show: Can’t make it to PDC but would like to hear more about BizTalk and how it relates to broader connected systems and SOA initiatives? Please join us at one of these locations for a day. We’ll be putting out a registration link & agenda soon but for now please note these locations/dates:
a. Vancouver – 30 October 2008
b. Toronto – 4th November 2008
c. Montr%u00e9al – 6th November 2008
Overview
In a service-oriented world, effective business processes unite people and systems. Find out how BizTalk%u00ae Server builds on the Business Process Management and SOA capabilities in prior releases to help your organization extend core process management technologies even further.
We will share the latest on Microsoft’s SOA offering – as well as details of the strategies and technologies that Microsoft is delivering today, over the next year, and into the future. At this event, you will learn:
%u00b7 BizTalk today and through FY’09
%u00b7 Microsoft’s Roadmap for the future
%u00b7 Microsoft’s “Real world” SOA vision,
positioning and messaging
%u00b7 Service Virtualization & ESB guidance 2.0
%u00b7 RFID & mobility of BizTalk
These events will provide further insight for customers and technology partners into best practices for building SOA and BPM solutions, guidance for advancing SOA, and using the latest Microsoft-based technologies for connecting people, processes and information.
Agenda
8:00 | Breakfast |
8:30 | Connected Systems Overview |
9:00 | BizTalk today, over the next year & Roadmap for the future |
10:00 | Adapter Pack |
11:00 | Break |
11:15 | Self Service SOA |
12:30 | Lunch |
1:30 | Service Virtualization & ESB 2.0 |
2:30 | RFID stack & Mobility |
3:30 | Break |
3:45 | Connected Systems Assessment |
5:00 | Reception |
6:00 | End |
Target Audience
This event will be of value to Technical Decision Makers, Developers and Architects interested in BizTalk, enterprise integration, and SOA solutions.
To Register
Space is limited so register today to ensure your attendance at this event. Click the city name below to register:
Vancouver: October 30, 2008 (Thurs)
Toronto: November4, 2008 (Tues)
Montreal: November 6, 2008 (Thursday)
Besides working on my RESTful.NET book, I’m also working with Aaron to
build a course on REST and WCF for Pluralsight.
We’re excited that the course is
now up and will have its first run in November (the 19th-21st to be exact) at the
Microsoft MTC in Boston – so sign
up today!
Everyone who attends will get a copy of my new book as well, so come and learn about
REST!
Check out my new book on REST.
In the first two posts of this series, I looked at how to aggregate data from multiple sources and mash them up into a single data entity that could be consumed by an RSS client. In this post, I will show off the new SOAP Connector from RSSBus.
Earlier in this series, I talked about […]
I just found out about a few new resources that Microsoft has put together to help developers locate relevant information for developing applications using WF and WCF. This includes some of the screencasts that Aaron and I have been doing on those technologies. It is nice to have this information in one place and provides a great jumping off point for people wanting to learn about these great technologies.
Endpoint.tv (the home of our screencasts and other podcasts) – http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Endpoint/
WF on the MSDN Social Server
WCF on the MSDN Social Server –
In addition, we are Pluralsight attempt to keep our resource pages for this stuff up to date with articles books etc. on our Wiki. The links to those
Pluralsight's WCF wiki – http://pluralsight.com/wiki/default.aspx/Aaron/WindowsCommunicationFoundationWiki.html
Pluralsight's WF wiki – http://www.pluralsight.com/wiki/default.aspx/Workflow/HomePage.html
The next UK SOA/BPM User Group Meeting has been announced which will be taking place on Tuesday, 14th October 2008 at Microsoft’s London office.
The meeting will include an introduction to BizTalk 2006 R3 2009, a presentation by ISV Frends Technology on integration solutions, plus developer and architecture sessions; there will also be beer and pizza. […]
eWeek taking us to the beginning of Oslo: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Windows/Microsofts-Distributed-Destination-Oslo/ Subscribe in a reader Join my blog network on Facebook Blog Networks Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick Read More……(read more)
There has indeed been a lot going on over the last month, and I apologize for the silence over the past couple weeks…but I believe the fruits of the work is now starting to bloom. This is the first in a series of three blog posts that I will be getting out this week; this one lays the foundation for the other two, explaining the new platform that we launched to host leaf-node developer-oriented content around Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
On Wednesday of last week, the talented folks over at MSDN launched the latest release of the MSDN Social platform. I’m pleased to say that the WF/WCF technologies were one of three groups to help beta-test the authoring environment, and go live on the new platform this month. Last week, we had a total of nine pages go live on the new server, and we’ll be adding additional content over the next few weeks.
On the main pages for the WF Dev Center and the WCF Dev Center (as an example, I’ve placed a screen capture of the WF Dev Center on the left), the change is pretty minimal right now…an updated version of this page will go live next week to try and better rationalize the platforms together and try to help the seams become less obvious. But last week’s update really sees two changes: changes in the Getting Started box, and a change to the Videos section.
On the WF Dev Center, the first thing you may notice is that the ‘Learn WF’ text on the upper-left box is now a hyper link. This will now take you to the new ‘Getting Started’ pages for WF. Also, the links below it now point to sub-pages of the new ‘Getting Started’ page, instead of the MSDN Online Library documentation (I’ll come back to this in a couple paragraphs).
The second thing that the reader may notice is that the ‘More…’ link is now gone from the ‘WF Videos’ section; replaced with links to the ‘WF Screencasts’ and ‘WF Webcasts’ pages on the new MSDN Social platform. Previously, the ‘More…’ link would take the reader to the same WF Videos RSS feed that the RSS graphic; while this made sense, it seemed a bit redundant and not too terribly useful for folks new to the technology.
In the next update to this page, we’ll be trying to pull content from the various MSDN services (Dev Centers, Online Library, Blogs, Social Bookmarking, Code Gallery, and Channel9), and trying to get it to flow better together. The goal is to have the WF and WCF Dev Centers function as a portal or hub for the developer community – helping to rationalize the content into something more cohesive and approachable.
At the moment, this means using a ‘Getting Started with…’ collection of links, which is done to keep the site in-line with the other MSDN Developer Center layouts. We are considering breaking this one box into a couple boxes, to better help users explore the material out there, both content and documentation. But we’ll come back to this over the coming weeks and months, if there is interest in having this discussion publicly.
But that brings us to the next step – what exactly the Dev Center becomes the hub for…
Visually, the site that the new pages are hosted on retains much of the same look and feel as the MSDN Dev Centers you’re familiar with. But the new server uses the same social platform as the new MSDN Forums and MSDN Social Bookmarking site. As opposed to providing a deep dive of the new platform, I hope to provide a quick, 5-minute overview of what we’ve done, and offer the opportunity for feedback – both publicly and privately (amusing note – I’ve gotten more private feedback than public…side note that it’s okay for folks to comment here ^_^).
To the right is the ‘Getting Started with Windows Workflow Foundation’ page on the new MSDN Social server. I’m hoping that the page is pretty self-explanatory, over all, but I would like to call your attention to five points about the page layout.
The first release of the MSDN Social content pages only supports the above layout in this release. We’re working with them to help get additional layout capabilities added, and hope to have more options when in their next release. But this offers an excellent and exciting opportunity.
With the new platform, we have the ability to publish content in a faster fashion, with greater control over what the look and feel is in the end. The current MSDN and TechNet Publishing System has been well documented, both in terms of its capabilities and its limitations, but the greatest limitation of the system has been the time it takes to publish, which has forced many groups to turn to using blogs or third-party sites as a mechanism for added user documentation and community engagement. For us, this offers an exciting opportunity to iterate more quickly, and with greater fidelity, documentation and link collections for you and with you – to hopefully make information on WF and WCF easier to find and easier to develop with.