David Chappell is both a technologist and an amazing wordsmith. In his most recent whitepaper, titled A First Look at WF 4.0, “Dublin”, and “Oslo” , he does an amazing job of detailing the new release of WF, and the new “Dublin” and “Oslo” technologies. …(read more)
I’m now in the session on the PDC 2008: WF 4.0 A first look. Just laying on my chair the leaflet: .NET Framework 4.0 Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation
In that leaflet there was a very nice announcement: Windows Server Dublin.
What’s Windows Server Dublin?
"Simplified hosting Experience with Dublin
Windows Server ‘Dublin’ technologies provide the .NET 4.0 developer with a standard host for WCF and WF application. ‘Dublin’ will allow you to host your workflow using pre-built developer services in a robust scalable environment – freeing you from writing your own host environment"
Woehooo, that’s makes my very happy, it seems that the Workflow Foundation environment gets more and more mature.
This is working together with Visual Studio 10 & .NET Framework 4.0, unfortunately this might take a while before it’s really in production. But he it’s really worth waiting for.
Found in the announcements (All are very good news and make me even more curious to get my hands on it.)
Q: Will “Dublin” support existing applications built on the .NET Framework? What should customers and partners do today to prepare?
A: Yes. “Dublin” will continue to provide backward compatibility for existing Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation applications. Customers can confidently begin building applications on top of both Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 today, with assurances that those applications will enjoy the benefits of “Dublin” when it becomes available.
Q: What are the customer benefits of the using Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation with “Dublin”?
A: The 4.0 release of .NET Framework represents the second generation of the Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation technologies. For the .NET developer, the 4.0 enhancements include these:
– Simplified coordination of work
– Ability to express applications and services in a way that makes sense to individual teams and businesses
– A framework for durable, long-running applications and services
Q: Will “Dublin” work with the “Oslo” modeling platform technologies?
A: Yes. “Dublin” will be the first Microsoft server product to deliver support for the “Oslo” modeling platform. “Dublin” does not require “Oslo” to operate and provide benefits of hosting .NET applications; however, administrators will be able to deploy applications from the “Oslo” repository directly to the “Dublin” application server. “Dublin” provides model-driven “Oslo” applications with a powerful runtime environment out of the box.
Q: Will “Dublin” work with Microsoft BizTalk Server’s enterprise connectivity services?
A: Yes. The integration server and application server workloads are distinct but complementary; customers want to be able to deploy them separately as needed to support their distinct requirements. For example, customers that don’t need the rich line-of-business (LOB) or business-to-business (B2B) connectivity provided by an integration server will deploy the Windows Server application server to host and manage middle-tier applications. Likewise, customers that need to connect heterogeneous systems across an enterprise, but don’t need to develop and run custom application logic, will deploy BizTalk Server. When customers need both capabilities, “Dublin” and BizTalk Server will work together nicely.
See also: Windows Server Application Server Roadmap
So I had a chance today to attend a session given Anders Hejlsberg on C# 4.0, and beyond. Honestly I walked out of the session going … that’s it? The feature list started with the dynamic keyword, which is cool but simply does not help the 80% of C# developers today. Most C# developers today are so bound to type safety that dynamic will give them even more heartburn than var did. Now in reality it will likely make scenarios like property movement from service contracts to domain objects easier, but all its really doing is the same thing I blogged about the other day when working against .NET types, just with more layers and interfaces so that it can be built into the language directly.
The next big thing mentioned was Named and Missing parameters. In the talk be mentioned that these should have been there long ago and he’s absolutely right about that. As such, you’ll get no big congratulations from me.
What else? Co-variance and Contra-variance of course … a couple of things on this. First, I don’t think a lot of people will care. Second, perhaps I’m slow but I have no idea why a new keyword is needed for this. If a type is being used only as an input, then the compiler can detect that and add the “in” keyword, and if it is output only, then add “out”. Why do I need to personally decorate this? Are their edge cases? Probably, but then have an opt-out model where you can take direct control only if needed.
The C# 5.0 stuff about the compiler as a service is … sexy. That is a concept that excites me, but that’s just teaser stuff right now and they have no idea how/when they’ll deliver. But what about other stuff? How about extension properties? What about interface inference (which is a major step towards duck typing)? I don’t see a bunch of “type safe” enterprise developers getting excited about C# 4.0 as presented. They might think its cool, but will they use it like they use automatic properties or LINQ? I think not.
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Just been to Anders Hejlsberg’s talk on the future of C#, where he outlined what’s coming in C# 4.0 and (some) of what might come in C# 5.0.
Importantly: C# 4.0 focuses on Dynamic Languages (i.e. the Dynamic Language Runtime
(DLR)) and concurrent programming (i.e. programming for multi-core CPUs).
New in C# 4.0 is support for the attic type dynamic.
This allows you to specify a type which isn’t known until runtime.
Under the hood, it all seems to use the whole Type Invoke mechanism (i.e. reflection,
which can be very slooooooow).
Which leads me to wonder: dynamics in C# 4.0 look like they’re cool in certain situations,
but you end up with perf-problems, and the possibility for difficult-to-find runtime
bugs.
For example, if I typed:
dynamic calc = GetCalculator();
int val = calc.App(2, 10);
Instead of
int val = calc.Add(2, 10);
well.. I won’t know that there is a bug until I get to that line
as it’s dynamically executed
At least, that’s my understanding.
It’ll be interesting to see how they address this.
In C# 5.0, Anders showed how they’re re-writing the C# compiler (csc) in managed code
– and allowing you to interact with it from code.
Specifically, he showed how to dynamically generate, compile and execute code.. similar
to what CodeDOM does today, but much much cooler.
When implementing/deploying and building all things BizTalk/Silverlight and related,
there’s going to be a time when you’re needing to see what’s on the wire.
I’ve currently found a few handy options:
Gives great anaylsis on HTML page composition/scripts and dynamic content source – A
MUST for any Silverlight work
Check them out folks – Smartsniff small enough to go on any memory key.
All free!
New MSDN REST dev center – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/netframework/cc950529.aspx
New REST toolkit from the product team on Codeplex – http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Wiki/View.aspx?title=WCF%20REST
– I haven’t looked at this in detail – but it does look pretty good.
Check out my new book on REST.
I’m trying really hard to not pay attention to PDC today, but, damn them and their interesting announcements! The “Cloud OS” turned out to be Azure. Good stuff there. “BizTalk Services” are dead, long live .NET Services. Neat that you have both Java and Ruby SDKs for .NET Services.
Also, we got a full release of […]
Well, I’m at the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) 2008 at the LA Convention Center in LA.
The keynote session is happening at the moment – Ray Ozzie has just announced Windows
Azure, the new name for the cloud-services platform (I had heard that they would
call is Windows Strata, but there you go!).
Azure look fairly cool, although the development environment is just VS.NET.
What’s new is that they host your services for you, including (in the future) SQL
Services i.e. hosting your databases, which will be fairly cool.
When you create an Azure service in VS.NET, and then choose deploy, the service is
packaged and you’re taking to the Azure
Developers Portal, where the service is uploaded.
Bear in mind that this Microsoft’s answer to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google
Apps – Microsoft are joining the party late, but I’m hoping that they have learnt
something by being able to watch from the sidelines.
I’m also interested in all the Oslo sessions – for those of us in the BizTalk world,
Oslo gives us information about what future versions of BizTalk will look like (post
BTS 2009).
What’s important to realise is that Oslo is the code name for a whole suite of tools,
as opposed to a single product.
I imagine this means that there will be a whole lot of products that come out under
the Oslo codename/brand.
Ray Ozzie set the stage by talking about how cloud computing is all about moving to the next level of web applications and services that need to reach your customers. The traditional data center model takes a lot of resources to manage all of the data centers, servers, etc. involving dealing with resources like electricity, networking, local laws, etc. Microsoft, and other cloud vendors can help meet these challenges by using their skills and experience in managing data centers, as well as their deep pockets, to build out the infrastructure, tools, and services to help meet this demand.
Windows Azure is the new name for Windows in the cloud. It provides a core set of services in the cloud including storage, workflow, messaging, and live services. The best part is that developers get to use Visual Studio to build the applications – there is a real focus on using existing tools for building cloud applications. Steve Marx did a simple demo showing how a developer can just build an ASP.NET application in Visual Studio using a new project / solution template RUN AND DEBUG LOCALLY, then publish it to the cloud and run it on the MS data center servers. I think the killer here is the developer story. I've used services from Amazon and others for cloud computing, but I think Microsoft has a real chance here to blow them all away if building and deploying applications is as easy as it looks (and appears it is). A more detailed demo showed off a fun little application called BlueHoo that uses Windows Azure as the backbone for a social networking type site based on Bluetooth connectivity between mobile devices.
Bob Muglia talked a bit about Microsoft .NET Services including messaging (Service Bus), access control and workflow. A lot of this is the evolution of BizTalk Services which I talked about recently at the Heartland Developer Conference. These provide a set of core services that developers can use in their applications to take advantage of the scale and reliability of the data center as well as advanced capabilities around messaging and identity when crossing internet and enterprise boundaries.
Identity Services – incorporates tightly with Active Directory to provide a great management and interoperability story for federated identity that is easier to manage and enables support for single sign-on and other identity services.
Microsoft SQL Services is the new name for the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) as it will shortly include more of the SQL features like reporting and analysis. Another interesting offering planned is to have a ton of reference data (think list of states, postal codes, e.g.) available as part of the data services so you don't have to buy and/or create all of that data.
Bob also talked about a project under development called "Atlanta" that is built in the System Center family, built on Windows Azure, and using Microsoft .NET Services to send data to the cloud and storing it in Microsoft SQL Services. He also showed using a new chart control in Silverlight displaying data queried from Microsoft SQL Services and then showed off a SQL Report using rich charts and gauges, again pulling data from Microsoft SQL Services. Pretty cool new stuff, and it is nice to see them integrating with and building on current tools and servers so it is not all new for developers.
For me, the best thing about the new cloud services is the way it leverages .NET and the current technologies and I'm impressed with the effort to make the developer experience really rich and simple for building cloud services.
Dave Thompson finished up by talking about SharePoint Services and CRM online and how developers can build components for these technologies. The idea is that for many businesses, they spend a lot of time managing services like SharePoint, exchange, etc. and that is not their core business. With the online services, Microsoft handles upgrades, patching, threat/security management, scale, etc. Also, instead of buying hardware and server licenses, you pay as you go for how much you use so the cost is not prohibitive for small businesses. Two key challenges/capabilities Dave talked about are extending the services just like we can extend the server products, and federated identity so a user can be managed in Active Directory and the Microsoft Services Connector links those to a Microsoft Services identity. This provides single sign-on for the user where they don't even know they are using an online service in some cases. For extending the systems, Exchange provides web services you can use, SharePoint online can use SharePoint Designer, web parts, etc. CRM provides web services as well and you can take advantage of data modeling and presentation capabilities.