I gave two talks in SoCal this week, one at the San Diego .NET User Group Connected Systems SIG in San Diego and one at the South Bay .NET User Group in Torrance.

The San Diego talk was titled Exercise WCF Best Practices and was a collection of practices with context and explanation on employing features and capabilities in the WCF stack in the best way. I talked about server side considerations including interface and layer separation, instancing model, exception handling, security model, and hosting, as well as client side considerations such as proxy creation, caching of proxies, and exception handling on the client side.

The slides and demos for this talk can be downloaded here:   Slides    Demos

The Torrance talk was A First Look at WF 4, which covered all the new features coming in WF 4. I covered the new designer, declarative XAML workflows, new activities in the base activity library, the flowchart workflow model, hosting of workflows, arguments, variables, and expressions, workflow services, and runtime improvements to name a few things.

The slides and demos for this talk can be downloaded here:   Slides    Demos

Sunday, August 16, 2009 4:47:13 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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This week I had the pleasure of speaking at TechEd Africa in Durban South Africa. It was a great venue, great attendees with insightful questions, and generally just a lot of fun to get to see a part of the world I’ve never been to while still teaching people about the cool capabilities of the .NET Framework and the best ways to employ those capabilities.

I did 5 sessions, briefly outlined here:

WUX303: New Tools and Controls for Building Rich WPF Line of Business Apps

The real title was something else, horrendously long and un-pronounceable in one breath, but that covers the gist of it. I showed how to use the DataGrid, DatePicker, and Calendar controls that are available for .NET 3.5 development today with the WPF Toolkit. If there are any WPF developers out there that don’t have that as part of their standard development machine set up after installing VS 2008, they are selling WPF short and hindering the user experience for their user (unless they have a third party control library that gives them similar and more functional versions of those kinds of controls). Those controls will also be incorporated as part of the framework in .NET 4.0, so I also demoed their use in VS 2010 along with the great new data binding features in the designer, which closely mimic the capabilities in Windows Form 2.0 that I covered extensively in my data binding book. I also talked about the new WPF Ribbon control and showed its use, and briefly talked about the MVVM pattern, showed an implementation in the demos, and mentioned the MVVM Toolkit that is in development that will make it easier to do.

SOA305: Exercise WCF Best Practices

In this session, I went through a bunch of best practices for WCF, along with their context, to help people identify practices they should be following regularly when implement WCF services and clients. I covered things like starting your services as PerCall rather than the default of sessionful, exception management on the server and client side, implementing and attaching error handlers, picking a hosting model from IIS, WAS, self-hosting, and eventually Dublin, self-hosting coding patterns, proxy creation and management patterns, and a brief touch on REST vs SOAP at the end. It was a jam packed session and I unfortunately did not have enough time with a 1 hour session to show as many code samples of the practices I was covering as I wanted.

SOA401: Developing Service Oriented Workflows

This was pretty much the same session I gave at TechEd US, with the exception that I had to cut some content and do less coding from scratch because the session here was only an hour vs 1:15 in the states.

SOA201: New Features in WCF and WF 4.0

This was a packed session, standing room only, so obviously a lot of people want to know what is coming down the pike. I covered the new features in WCF 4.0 including simplified configuration, Discovery, Router Service, REST features, and a few others. Then I switched to WF 4.0 since the changes are even more sweeping there and covered the new declarative workflow model, data flow with variables and arguments, workflow services and more. Fun session, just wish I could have twice as much time to give all the great new features better coverage.

Whiteboard Session: Are WCF and WF for Mere Mortal Developers?

Had good attendance and some great questions and discussions with the attendees about the barriers to adoption with WF, what are some of the scenarios where you should just not bother with WF, where those scenarios change with WF 4 compared to 3, and what some of the pain points are with WF in terms of adoption. There was also a fair amount of discussion on WCF, talking about challenges and solutions as far as managing configuration of services, diagnostics and tracing capabilities, factoring of service interfaces and moving to WCF from other technologies and architectures.

For those that attended, thanks! For them and others who want the demo code, here is one zip with all session demos in it.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009 5:24:08 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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