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 — all demo, no slides.
MSDN Webcast: geekSpeak: Cloud Services 101 with Aaron Skonnard
12/3/08; 12:00 PM (PST)
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032397078&Culture=en-US
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 RESTful Web Services book. And I love the form factor.
Definitely a must have for .NET developers moving towards REST.
Congrats Jon!
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 you want to ensure that your services are always running and that the host process won't be automatically recycled causing havoc on your underlying resources (think sockets). These are just a few of the reasons why some folks prefer this hosting technique in some cases.
Be sure to check out our growing collection of short screencasts on our screencast landing page.
Previous WCF Screencasts (RSS for all posts in the series)
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 PowerPoint slides I used in the presentation.
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Take care and enjoy.
Mick.
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 if you want to try it out, go ahead and download it! Make sure you let me know any comments, improvements and bugs you may find. Over here you can see a video containing the installation instructions and a small demo. Make sure you install the jQuery component of the SmartTools project as well, since it relies on that one.
SmartTools.DockNavigation from Jan Tielens on Vimeo.
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 latest in my link-listing series. Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I’ve done myself in the past.
Geolocation/Geotargeting Reverse IP Lookup Code: Scott Hanselman has a cool sample that demonstrates how to perform IP address lookups on users visiting your site to determine where they are located on the globe (down to the latitude and longitude). Pretty cool stuff.
Tracking User Activity: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that discusses how to track end-user activity when visiting an ASP.NET web site.
iTunes Data Grid Skin: Matt Berseth continues his cool series showing off cool new skins you can apply to ASP.NET controls (especially the GridView and DetailsView controls). This post shows off a pretty sweet iTunes like skin.
Using ETW to Troubleshoot AppDomain Restarts and other Issues: Tess Ferrandez has another great post that demonstrates how to use the ETW tracing features built-into ASP.NET and Windows to trouble-shoot runtime issues.
ASP.NET Dynamic Data Videos: Joe Stagner has 6 nice ASP.NET Dynamic Data "How Do I?" videos posted on www.asp.net that you can check out to learn about the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature in .NET 3.5 SP1.
A "Many to Many" field template for Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has a great post that talks about how to enable Many To Many scenarios with ASP.NET Dynamic Data.
Customizing ASP.NET Dynamic Data and Customizing a Template Field: Laurent Duveau has two nice posts in a series he is doing on using ASP.NET Dynamic Data and customizing the UI generated from it.
ASP.NET Dynamic Data Routing: Rachel Appel has a nice post that talks about how to use the new ASP.NET routing features with ASP.NET Dynamic Data to enable customized URLs.
Fun with T4 Templates and Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has a cool post on how to use the T4 templating engine built-into Visual Studio to automate ASP.NET Dynamic Data form generation.
Using User Controls as Page Templates in Dynamic Data: David Ebbo has another nice post that talks about how to use user controls with ASP.NET Dynamic Data.
ASP.NET AJAX – Observing Updates to Plain Old JavaScript Objects: Dave Reed has a great blog post about one of the new features coming in ASP.NET AJAX – support for observing updates on plain old javascript objects.
Using the Power of Binding to Animate Changes: Bertrand Le Roy has a nice post that talks about the new ASP.NET AJAX binding features coming and how you can use them with jQuery to animate changes.
Instantiating Components on template markup: Bertrand Le Roy has a nice post that talks about client-side AJAX templating approaches and some of the new features coming in ASP.NET AJAX.
Putting more than one behavior on one element and Getting a Reference to a Behavior: Bertrand Le Roy has two nice articles that talk about how to use the client-side behaviors feature of ASP.NET AJAX.
Check/Uncheck all Items in an ASP.NET Checkbox List using jQuery: A nice article by Suprotim Agarwal that shows how to write client-side jQuery code to enable check/uncheck for all items within a checkbox list.
How to Setup ASP.NET MVC on IIS6: Phil Haack has a great post that walks-through how to enable ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 servers (including how to enable it on a hosting server that you can’t install anything on).
Fluent Route Testing in ASP.NET MVC: Ben Scheirman has a nice post where he blogs about new helper methods he is creating that make it easier to unit test ASP.NET MVC routes using a fluent API.
Autocomplete using jQuery, ASP.NET MVC and JSON: Faraz Tabibian has a nice blog sample that demonstrates how to implement an autocomplete textbox using jQuery and ASP.NET MVC.
Hierarchical TreeView with ASP.NET MVC & jQuery: Mike Bosch has a cool sample that demonstrates how to add treeview UI to an ASP.NET MVC site using jQuery.
MSTest Tip: Double-Click to Go to Failing Test: Simone Chiaretta has a cool tip that can speed up navigating to a test when it fails in the built-in VS 2008 unit test runner.
How to Add a Linked Item to a Project: Sara Ford has a nice post that talks about how to add linked items to your VS projects.
Go to Class Definition for CSS: Nice post from the VS web tools team that talks about the "Go To Class Definition" feature in VS 2008 for CSS.
How to Set a fixed Port for the VS Development WebServer: Another nice post from the VS web tools team that discusses how to assign a fixed HTTP port to an ASP.NET project within Visual Studio.
XAML Power Toys – Instant Form Creation: Karl Shifflett has a great video that shows off his XAML Power Toys tool that integrates into Visual Studio and enables rapid forms creation for WPF and Silverlight.
AutoCompleteBox Control – The Missing Guide: Jeff Wilcox has an awesome post that talks about the new Silverlight AutoCompleteBox control in the Silverlight Toolkit. Very useful reading.
Silverlight Charting and BabySmash: Scott Hanselman has a cool post where he talks about how he integrated the new Silverlight Chart control with his BabySmash sample from his awesome talk at the PDC.
Silverlight Validator & Input Toolkit: A really nice new CodePlex project that enables validation controls for Silverlight – making form input scenarios a lot easier.
Hope this helps,
Scott
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 year. The question of how to unit test WF activities/workflows has been something that I’ve heard asked about at the last few conferences I’ve attended (both internal and customer conferences; at the WF booth and advanced WF sessions), and it’s been a question our field has been getting as well.
In answer to the question – there have been a couple excellent blog posts on the topic this past summer: Maurice de Beijer wrote an excellent (and concise) blog entry on the topic in June – which was the inspiration for the lab, and Ron Jacobs blogged on the topic following a conversation we were having about whether to do this HOL. And, most recently, WF unit testing was covered in the last two issues of MSDN Magazine (Matt Milner’s Nov-2008 Foundations article and Josh Lane’s Dec-2008 article ‘Real World WF: Best Practices’).
But the feedback has been what was lacking was a good, approachable manner of learning how to do WF unit testing. So we worked with David Starr, a trainer and consultant specializing in agile processes, to build a lab that attempted to demonstrate how a developer can use Visual Studio Team System and/or Professional to establish unit tests for WF activity and workflow development. The lab was written assuming basic experience with WF 3, but no prior experience with test-first development principles. To work with some of the less unit-test-ready aspects of WF 3.5, David walks the user through the use of fake objects and the Rhino Mocks mocking framework (there are a variety of mocking frameworks out there; Rhino Mocks is one of them).
As mentioned in the beginning of the blog post, in addition to hosting the lab in our hands-on-lab areas at TechEd this year, we have published the lab to MSDN Virtual Labs to enable a broader audience to experience the lab. For those unfamiliar, the Virtual Labs environment offers you a way to test drive Microsoft software without having to download or install the software on your local machine. To do the hands on lab, you visit the Virtual Lab website and it will provision you a pristine virtual server for you do the lab, which is [virtually] yours for a two-hour block. The connection to the server is done through the web browser, requiring only the installation of an ActiveX component. You can then follow the instructions in the lab manual to try out the lab and learn more about unit testing activities and workflows WF 3.5.
In addition to this WF lab, there are a couple other notable virtual labs I would like to point out:
We’re working on delivering a few new WF hands on labs via this method over the coming months. We are working on a new hands-on-lab detailing conversation correlation in WCF workflow services (based on Matt Winkler’s TechEd talks) and also updating the VS2005 hands-on-labs to VS2008, incorporating user feedback.
We are also in the process of posting the test-first development with WCF hands-on-lab. If you poke around in the C:\Labs directory of this virtual lab, you’ll notice it’s there (with lab manuals and relevant begin/end code).
I hope you enjoy the new lab; and, as always, your feedback is appreciated!
Cliff
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 references to support asynchronous calls, and then I'll show you how to write the async invocation logic. Enjoy!
Be sure to check out our growing collection of screencasts via our screencast landing page at Pluralsight.
Previous WCF Screencasts (RSS for all posts in the series)