Relax. Grab a beer (a Guiness perhaps). Dublin , the application server role extension to WAS/IIS, is to be released roughly three months after Visual Studio 2010, so somewhere around 1,5-2 years from now. There is still time to come to grips with it…(read more)
Just at a session on BizTalk Express, sorry Dublin
Dublin is a set of extensions to Web Application Server (WAS) also known as Web Process
Activation Server (also WAS) – confused yet?!
Basically, Dublin allows hosting of WCF/WF services/workflows on IIS/WAS.
What it adds though is UIs for Hosting, Messaging, Durability, Correlation, and Tracking
Sound familiar? Yup, all things that BTS provides today.
It’s early days yet – most of the advanced stuff is currently configured via PowerShell
scripts, but it shows where they’re going with it.
Persistence is implemented by storing message information in SQL Server.
In the IIS Administration Console, you can look at suspended instances, resume them,
cancel them, etc. All stuff that seems very very familiar to a BTS dev.
Correlation and filtering is achieved via XPath statements (no comments on whether
it loads the message into a DOM, or whether it supports fast-read-only forward XPath
only).
We’ve all received copies of Dublin with our PDC bits – I’ll be keen to see what perf
you can achieve under load. I suspect the answer is “not much”.
The BTS dev team spent a lot of time tuning the filtering/persistence stuff, and in
a lot of ways it seems that the Dublin team are reinventing the wheel here.
One cool thing shown was creating a model in Quadrant (the Oslo modelling tool) and
deploying WCF/WF apps from there to Dublin.
More to come as I spend time with Dublin.
I’m sorry, is it just me? I just can’t get excited about Windows Vista R2,
sorry, Windows 7.
[side note: Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 use v6.0 of the windows kernel.
Windows 7 uses v6.1 of the kernel. They’ve also upgraded Windows Server 2008 to use
v6.1 – and called this refresh Windows Server 2008 R2 but they’ve called the client
refresh Windows 7. Even though it technically is just Vista refreshed with an updated
kernel.
I suspect that MS got so burnt with the Vista brand name, that they’ve been forced
to re-name it.
But I wonder what the client OS which will contain v7.0 of the kernel will be called.
I suspect it won’t be Windows 8!]
So Windows 7 is pretty much Windows Vista with some new features.
And some of them are pretty cool (e.g. reduced resource footprint, improvements in
collaborating with connected computers/devices). But don’t be fooled into thinking
that this is a new OS, or even an evolution – it’s Vista with some new features.
Which is absolutely fine – Microsoft have just managed to stabilize Vista, and are
starting to leave the early painful years behind.
For me, the coolest and most useful feature is the ability to boot from a VHD.
Now just stop and think about what that means: there must be a thin layer of bootstrap
code which knows how to read a VHD and present to as a physical HDD/Storage Controller
to the system.
[Note: yes, Win 7 allows you to create/mount VHDs using DiskManager, but this functionality
has been around for a while if you installed Virtual Server, although it was command-line
only.]
I imagine this bootstrap code is pretty much the same as for Windows Hyper-V server,
which works on a similar principle i.e. booting from images, although Hyper-V does
this in a virtualised environment, allowing you to boot multiple VHDs at the same
time.
What I’m not clear about is if the VHD must contain an install of Win 7, or whether
you can boot any OS install. If the latter, then this is super cool.
(given that there appears to be a VHD HostBusAdapter in Device Manager in Win 7, I
suspect it’s the former i.e. Win 7 only VHDs. I hope not.)
What this means for me: I do all of my BizTalk/Services dev in Windows Server 2003/2008.
And up to now, this has been done using Virtual PC images (running Vista 64-bit as
the host OS).
But now, hopefully, I have the choice of booting my dev VHD, or running it in VPC/Virtual
Server/Hyper-V.
And that’s pretty cool.
I've heard alot of people, and helped a few, that have had problems with the PDC Wireless network. The things that many people do at conferences is to sit with their laptop in their knee. Doing this they are not plugged in. When your laptop goes into…(read more)
The first version of WCF didn't have any built-in REST support. WCF 3.5 introduced a "Web" programming model that enabled REST service development scenarios (through classes like WebServiceHost, WebServiceHostFactory, WebHttpBehavior, WebHttpBinding, WebGetAttribute, WebInvokeAttribute, UriTemplate, etc). However, building RESTful services today with WCF 3.5 still leaves a lot to be desired.
At PDC this week, Microsoft announced the WCF REST Starter Kit, which makes building RESTful services with WCF much easier. You can download the WCF REST Starter Kit from CodePlex. It comes with a new library of APIs, both new classes and extension methods, that address some of the common pain points around building RESTful services with WCF 3.5 today. For example, you'll find new classes like WebServiceHost2, WebServiceHost2Factory, WebHelpAttribute, WebCacheAttribute, WebProtocolException, and RequestInterceptor to name a few. One of my favorite features is how the new host enables an automatic documentation page for your RESTful services describing the URI design, message formats, and sample instances, making it much easier for clients to discover how to integrate with your RESTful service.
Today when you download the WCF REST Starter Kit from CodePlex, you get the source code, which opens up additional opportunities for community collaboration and internal customization. As we move towards .NET 4.0, the WCF team will be looking at the various features found in the WCF REST Starter Kit they'll be evaluating which ones make sense to roll back into the .NET framework moving forward.
The WCF REST Starter Kit also comes with a Visual Studio installer that provides a suite of new project templates that provide skeleton implementations for today's most common types of RESTful services including: REST singleton services, REST collection services, AtomFeed services, AtomPub services, and HTTP Plain XML (POX) services. These templates make it really easy to get simple REST services up-and-running quickly.
If you want to learn more about REST and the WCF REST Starter Kit, browse to the new REST landing page on MSDN WCF Dev Center. This will become the new gathering place for WCF REST resources.
I recently wrote a REST whitepaper called A Guide to Designing and Building RESTful Services with WCF 3.5, which covers REST design fundamentals, the new WCF 3.5 programming model, and the new WCF REST Starter Kit. It's a great way to get your head around REST and to start writing REST code. I've also recorded a bunch of screencasts illustrating how to get started with the starter kit. You'll find links on the REST landing page.
Kudos to Microsoft, specifically Vish, RC, Steve, Kent, and the rest of team for providing first-class REST support to .NET developers. I'm excited to watch this project continue to evolve over the next year.
If you're a Microsoft Connected Systems developer, and you're at the PDC this week, you're swimming in a sea of new technologies that will surely impact your life in the years ahead. There are too many specific things to enumerate in one post but there are several major themes:
Over the past year, I've been following these developments closely but haven't been able to talk about them in public due to the typical NDAs. However, now that PDC is here and things are out in the open, the information can finally start flowing. I've been busy working on a lot of content leading up to the PDC, both in the form of whitepapers and screencasts, that you'll see showing up on the sites above.
I'll be following up with more in-depth posts of these various topics over the next several days. Stay tuned!
If you're a Microsoft Connected Systems developer, and you're at the PDC this week, you're swimming in a sea of new technologies that will surely impact your life in the years ahead. There are too many specific things to enumerate in one post but there are several major themes:
Over the past year, I've been following these developments closely but haven't been able to talk about them in public due to the typical NDAs. However, now that PDC is here and things are out in the open, the information can finally start flowing. I've been busy working on a lot of content leading up to the PDC, both in the form of whitepapers and screencasts, that you'll see showing up on the sites above.
I'll be following up with more in-depth posts of these various topics over the next several days. Stay tuned!
So you've probably heard of this thing called Oslo and the components of it. In this post I'll try to address Oslo from the point of view of the BizTalk Developer. You could argue that BizTalk has a pretty model driven approach to development…(read more)
As much as I am enjoying the PDC and all the REST love, I also am really excited about
M
Expect more posts and information on M in the next few weeks here on my blog (this
post is really mostly motivational for me to get blogging again :)).
Edit:
I’m also pretty excited about Windows Azure, hosted
solutions might not be for everyone, but I think there are a lot of interesting things
that might be good to host off-premise (if I write “Cloud” my wife is going to hurt
me, because she thinks its the most idiotic technical jargon word she’s ever heard).
I’ve actually been playing with the beta bits, and I’ve been super impressed with
the development environment and the runtimes.
Check out my new book on REST.
As promised, this is the first of a series of posts that intend to cover the new capabilities implemented in the WCF REST Starter Kit to enhance the development of RESTful services using WCF. Specifically, this post is focus on how to enable caching on…(read more)