Today I am giving a session on WCF Data Services at DevTeach. In the session, I cover the concepts of WCF Data Services including what it is for, how it works, OData protocol,, REST-style web services, and relations to other parts of the .NET communications stack. Then I spend most of the session walking through a demo building up a data service, showing how to query it from various clients, showing how to create a .NET client and query and update through it, as well as using interceptors and securing the service.

The resulting demo code can be downloaded here:  Demos.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011 1:35:10 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Tomorrow I’ll be giving a webinar on securing Silverlight apps with WCF RIA Services. It will show how you can leverage the security and personalization features of WCF RIA Services whether you choose to use that technology for your service calls or not. You’ll see how to set things up, how to get a client side security context, and also how to secure service calls from your client using the same secure session.

Hope to see you there:

http://www.silverlightshow.net/news/Webinar-Security-WCF-RIA.aspx

Tuesday, May 24, 2011 5:51:37 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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I’ve just uploaded my materials for my upcoming DevTeach sessions and I’m really looking forward to the conference. DevTeach is a great conference, and Montreal is a beautiful city to visit in the spring.

This year I am giving three talks. The abstracts are below for those. Keep an eye on my blog the week of the event if you want to get your hands on the demos for the sessions. If you are planning to attend, you can check out the schedule here so you can try to fit these in.

NET323 – Expose and Consume WCF Data Services

WCF Data Services is a framework built on top of WCF that allows you to easily expose collections of data via the OData protocol for ad-hoc query from clients as well as for data updating scenarios. In this session, you'll learn how to define and host WCF Data Services, how to consume them from .NET clients, how to secure access to the data, and how to perform data updates through the services with validation and business logic in the call chain. You'll learn a little bit about the OData protocol along the way and how these same services can be consumed by any platform since they are based on open standards.

SLV365 – Secure and Personalize Your Silverlight Apps with WCF RIA Services

One of the appealing features of WCF RIA Services is that you can easily secure calls to your services using standard browser-based security mechanisms including Windows and Forms authentication. You can use RIA Services declarative security model in your domain services to authenticate and authorize access to them, as well as to establish a security context in the Silverlight client that can be used for authorization and personalization. These features can be used from WCF RIA Services even if you do not use any other aspects of WCF RIA Services and just call other WCF services as part of your application. Additionally, the WCF RIA Services security can be integrated with other WCF services in the same host for a single unified security model. This session will walk you through how to leverage these features of WCF RIA Services.

SLV368 - Tackle the Complexity of Async Calls in Silverlight and WPF clients
Whenever doing blocking tasks, particularly service calls in a Silverlight or WPF client, you will need to make those calls asynchronously. While async calls have been around for a long time in .NET, the patterns for addressing them have been changing and improving. This session will cover several common patterns for addressing async calls in client applications, including new and emerging approaches to async patterns including Reactive Extensions that let you treat asynchronous execution like a LINQ collection and the Task-based Async pattern and keywords coming for the C# and VB languages. This session will take the mystery and confusion out of what happens when and how to keep your code clean and safe in an inherently asynchronous client world.

Friday, May 20, 2011 8:41:59 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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I’m about to head off to do my talk on WCF RIA Services at TechEd and wanted to make the demo code available to the attendees ahead of time.

In this talk, I cover the concepts and capabilities of WCF RIA Services. I talk about what it is good for, as well as some scenarios where you should not use it. I cover the features of querying, updating, and validating data, as well as securing your Silverlight clients with it.

The demos I will do during the event can be downloaded here: Demos.

Enjoy!

Wednesday, May 18, 2011 6:50:26 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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I just finished up my session on async calls at TechEd and wanted to share the demos with the attendees and anyone else who cares to take a look.

In the talk I demoed working with the Dispatcher to get work put onto the UI thread at the appropriate time, but spent most of the talk working through a simple UI workflow example with a synchronous method, a Begin/End async method, an Async/Completed version, a Task Parallel Library (TPL) version, and a Async CTP (Task-based Async Pattern) approach. I finished off with some coverage of Reactive Extensions (Rx), showing an example of an auto-complete textbox that looks up customer data through async service calls.

The demo code includes both a Silverlight and a WPF version of the app, but since TPL and the Async CTP stuff is not available in Silverlight yet but will be in a future version, the WPF code is the more complete.

You can download the full sample code here: AsyncDemo.zip.

Enjoy!

Tuesday, May 17, 2011 3:22:18 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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