I am more than a little tardy with this blog post but the link for the tutorial code can be found here: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/windowsazureessentialslaunch042010.zip

If you had already downloaded the code from the link specified in my tutorial slides, that link (and this one) are both updated with some new stuff.

If you attended my similar tutorial in Norway, there are updates to the scripts here that you might be interested in. I created some PowerShell scripts to delete all Windows Azure deployments (avoid charges when you aren’t using your account and blast-em away) and to deal with SQL Azure firewall settings and database installation using script as well. The document in the zip tells you all about environment needs.

Enjoy!

Just returned from the VS Launch last week, and as promised here is the code for my sessions. I will post a separate entry with all the code for my Azure Tutorial which was on Thursday. And, as always, if you are looking for something in particular and can’t find it here, just drop me an email!

AppFabric Access Control

• http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/AccessControlSamples.zip
• Samples for both WCF/REST samples and web resources such as Web Form and ASHX
• Samples include a complete object model for working with Simple Web Token (SWT) and components for both WCF and ASP.NET applications to build client requests and process incoming tokens

RIA applications and WCF

• http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/RIAandWCF.zip

Data Access

• http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/DataAccessSamples2010.zip

WCF. Workflow Services and AppFabric

• http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/WCFWorkflowServicesAppFabric.zip

At the PDC last week I presented a revamped version of my massive one-day presentation covering language trends, data access technologies, windows and web development, WCF and workflow, “Dublin” (now App Fabric), identity and cloud computing with Azure. Whew! Always a ton of work getting this presentation updated but it is a ton of fun to discuss all of these technologies in a single jam packed session and I hope you all enjoyed it. Here is a link to the goods:

http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/technologyroadmapFA09.zip

At long last here is my post from the recent Dev Connections conference in Las Vegas. It was an interesting time getting things up and running for the conference what with the PDC the week after and so many updates to the Azure stack right before…but it was well worth the effort! Here are the sessions and related code samples.

• Session: Protecting Web Resources with the Access Control Service
• SDK samples show of many of the things I used in my demo including batch files that initialize rules configuration, the Acm.exe tool, authorizing access in WCF services and ASP.NET application endpoints
• Session: Windows Identity Foundation and WCF
• See my samples at http://claimsbasedwpf.codeplex.com which have been updated for the released version of WIF
• Session: Create Claims-Based ASP.NET Applications with WIF and CardSpace
• Passive federation demo: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/wifpassivefed.zip
• See web-based CardSpace samples from the CardSpace V2 SDK, which include a managed card and many examples for how to invoke CardSpace from an <object> tag
• For more details on working with managed cards see my samples and video at http://cardspaceandwpf.codeplex.com
• Session: Building a WCF Router Today and Tomorrow
• Many router samples: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/routers.zip
• WCF 4 samples including routers: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/WCF4Demos.zip

I’m’ still working on updating all my Azure samples since the PDC last week, so I’ll post tutorial code separately.

A few short months after my EU tour (see previous blog post) I will be delivering a variation of my technology roadmap (once again, affectionately known as the technology avalanche) at the PDC in November 2009. You can bet even in that two short months I will have updated the seminar once again, to better reflect the latest state of the various technologies I will discuss. The goal of this workshop at the PDC will be to prepare you for the rest of PDC - get you up to speed with the various technologies from platform releases to languages, for data access, windows and web development, for middle-tier development, for security and identity related, and for cloud computing. Lots to cover, lots of fun to be had discussing the avalanche! You must join me!

Here are the details!

http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/Microsoft-Technology-Roadmap

Developers increasingly have more on their mind and on their plate. Though Visual Studio and the .NET Framework both provide tools that yield an overall increase in productivity during the development cycle, the avalanche of technologies that build upon these foundations can seem overwhelming if not insurmountable at times. The goal of this workshop is to help you understand the value proposition of each technology and to prepare yourself to make the most of the rest of PDC. We’ll help you make sense of language and platform trends, data access tier advances, technologies for windows client and web application development, the middle tier evolution with WCF and workflow, identity platforms and technologies, and cloud computing.

A few years ago I brought my Microsoft Technology Roadmap - affectionately known as the Technology Avalanche - to 5 countries in the EU. I thought there were a lot of technologies to cover then...but here we are two years later and there is no shortage of new technologies to talk about and so I will embark once again to some 5 countries including Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Here is a list of dates and locations:

• September 28, Frankfurt, Germany
• September 29, Copenhagen, Denmark
• September 30, Stockholm, Sweden
• October 6, Oslo, Norway

I created this seminar to help all of you developers and architects keep up with all the many platform releases and technology stacks - to help you make sense of which technologies are right for your scenarios, and keep you apprised of the status of upcoming releases and their value proposition. It is no small undertaking I assure you! I am constantly updating this each time I deliver it, even if only a few months pass between events! I hope you will enjoy this renewed 2009 tour!

Here is a summary of the seminar:

With these rapidly changing times, developers have a lot more on their mind and on their plate than they did at any point in recent time. Although the Visual Studio and the .NET Framework both provide tools that yield an overall increase in productivity during the development cycle, the avalanche of technologies that builds upon these foundations can seem overwhelming if not insurmountable at times. This workshop will take you through a guided tour of the Microsoft technologies available today, tomorrow, and into the foreseeable future...and enable educated decisions on aligning your product road map with upcoming technologies.

Outline

· Language and platform trends for .NET 2.0 through .NET 4.0 including discussions of the language trends for C# 4.0 and Visual Basic 10, F# and parallel computing

· Advances for developing the data access tier from data sets and readers to LINQ, Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and velocity

· Windows client development with WPF and the relevance of Windows Forms and ClickOnce

· Web development with ASP.NET, AJAX and Silverlight

· The evolution of the middle tier with WCF and Workflow, and the relevance of WCF Workflow Services in .NET 4.0 and Dublin

· The impact codename “Oslo” will have on the future of Microsoft development

· A review of identity platforms including Windows Identity Foundation, ADFS and Windows Cardspace

· The benefits of cloud computing with the Windows Azure Platform

In this intense, one–day briefing, you will see numerous demonstrations of these technologies, we will assess the benefits and advantages of the forward trends and you will gain an overall picture of each technology’s place in your development efforts today and tomorrow–for each respective discipline. Developers, architects, and technical leads who would like to gain some perspective on the Microsoft road map, the applicability of each technology, the choices and the trade–offs, will greatly benefit from this workshop.

Thanks to a customer of mine (thank you Christoph!) some major improvements have been made to the ExceptionHandlingProxyBase type. Plus, a duplex version now exists. Nothing like using the code in production to work through the real limitations. I knew I had to add a lot of these things, but this week I had a good reason to do it.

The proxy generator can be found at http://wcfproxygenerator.codeplex.com

Invoke() and Value Types
**I had a problem surface when I tried to return a value type (not a reference type) from Invoke(). I created this dependency in the generic method by requiring the generic type parameter to be a class. I changed this so now you can use value types freely.

Thread Safety
** A lock is used for all calls that touch the channel. But you can have parallel calls through Invoke() of course.
** Now you can safely have parallel calls to invoke, but if one thread encounters an exception other threads queue up before invoking the operation until the proxy is safely recreated.
** Disposal is now safe in multithreading environments.

Disposal
** Now all operations check if the object is disposed and throws if it is.

Initialization
** Now constructors call virtual Initialize() methods to support scenarios where the derived class wants to calculate values before calling down to base.
** Initialization only supported once.

Creation and Recreation
** Now the two are considered different so that we can enforce creation only once, while allowing multiple recreation attempts. Recreation also uses a lock to protect Invoke() and fires an event after so clients can do other work after recreation, such as subscribing to a service after the proxy is recreated.

Communication Events
** Clients can subscribe to these events even if channel isn't created yet. Events from the inner channel are fired to listeners.

Support for Message parameter type
** Invoke() retries didn't work if you had a contract that supports Message type. That's because you can't "replay" a Message instance, once it is read, it cannot be read again. There are two possible ways to handle this:
a) Buffer the message before each first attempt to invoke and create a copy of the message for the first and (if applicable) second call. But, this means buffering unnecessarily when things are going well.
b) allow the application to buffer in the derived type when using Message types. Then, subscribe to the RetryInvoke (new) event and supply a message before retry.
** I implemented b).

Hope you like it! Cheers!

The cool thing about creating an add-in for my exception handling proxy is that now it makes it easier for me to use it all the time when I create sample projects. Before, I would have to copy and paste the base type and hand-build the proxy, and this just wasn't realistic.

I'm blogging this because of course this also means I will uncover any bugs or missing features more quickly since I'm trying to use it everywhere. One such thing was that a change I made to my proxy wrapper to automate creating the channel in the constructor actually had a nasty side-effect that didn't surface until I tried to use it for a federated security sample. ClientCredentials was not accessible since the channel was already created. My bad.

I have since updated the proxy generator here: http://wcfproxygenerator.codeplex.com and there is a new release that includes the add-in sources in case you want to change how that works.

Even though I've been using this wrapper code in different incarnations for years, I am going to leave the codeplex site in Beta until I have tested with more scenarios. I think it is pretty stable though...aside from that little bug I introduced at the last minute. New code = more testing.

I'm loving using this everywhere, I hope you do to!

I have never run into this problem before, but I just realized that in WCF applications when I provide a certificate reference with FindBySubjectName - it can fail if you have two similarly named (not identical) certificates. I don't think this is by design, it has to be a bug, but I found a workaround.

Short and Sweet...here it is. If I have a certificate reference like this for "RP":

<certificateReference findValue="RP" storeLocation="LocalMachine" 
storeName="My" x509FindType="FindBySubjectName"/>

But, I also have a cert named "RPSTS" in the same cert store, the lookup fails because it can't find a unique cert by the name RP. I don't know about you but I think "RP" and "RPSTS" are pretty unique...but not as far as WCF is concerned. I usually use FIndByThumbprint for production code, but for code samples and reference materials I want it to be obvious which cert we are dealing with, it is hard enough to trouble-shoot certs without having to look up thumbprints every time.

A workaround for this is to use FindBySubjectDistinguishedName so this works even if I have "CN=RP" and "CN=RPSTS" in my cert store.

<certificateReference findValue="CN=RP" storeLocation="LocalMachine" 
storeName="My" x509FindType="FindBySubjectDistinguishedName"/>

Shweet!

Updated: 01/07/09 - adding WPF localization link below, and the others are really close...just final details taking forever

If you know where my technology focus lies you might be surprised to see the term WPF in my blog...I know, it's weird. But not really! You see I have been working on a rather large project to give WPF some love as it relates to my world - which means WCF, federated security, globalization/localization, and ClickOnce. Another part of this "client love" is WCF for mobile devices.

So far, I have the following projects published and ready to go:

• WCF Guidance for Mobile Developers: http://wcfguidanceformobile.codeplex.com
  • This is fully legit! I worked with Nick Landry to bring the mobile love into this paper...and it is a word of art I think because the community has been really crying out for this content. Here you'll find a whitepaper and lots of code samples.
• WCF Guidance for WPF Developers: http://wcfguidanceforwpf.codeplex.com
  • This site has a whitepaper, code samples and a short webcast series to bring WPF developers up to speed on necessary WCF topics. Some of it is intro, some of it is help to avoid common issues including proxies and exception handling, multithreading, proxy lifetime management, etc.
• WPF ServiceHost: http://wpfservicehost.codeplex.com
  • This site has a few templates for WPF developers that need to either a) host a service in their client app, or b) host a service in their client app as part of a pub-sub scenario. Even if you don't need it today, check out the templates and tell me what you think on the codeplex site!
• Exception Handling WCF Proxy Generator: http://wcfproxygenerator.codeplex.com
• This has to be one of my favorite installments to this series! I have been using an evolving flavor of an exception handling proxy for years now, to help with proxy lifetime management and to hide unwanted exception from the user such as session timeouts or faulted channels that are not due to any serious communication issues. Basically, recreate the channel when it fails and try to recover. I finally (with the help of my friend Buddhike de Silva) put this into a nice Visual Studio Add-In. It currently works on Service References only, but I plan to add value later by making it work on any service contract in your solution...I'd love to know what you think of this one!
• WPF Localization Guidance: http://wpflocalization.codeplex.com
• There isn't much guidance for WPF and there are some choices to make that require explanation indeed. Rich Strahl, a good friend and one of the few people I know who care about localization as well, did most of the work on this paper. There may be some additions to this over the next few months as well.

There are a few more installments to come with this massive project. In the next week or so you'll see the following items that I have already well under way:

• WPF and ClickOnce
• WPF localization guidance
• WPF and CardSpace
• WPF and claims-based/federated security scenarios

Enjoy!