Indigo
Since I joined Microsoft Belux last year I've been thinking about moving my blog to MSDN. But ever since I didn't really saw the added value of moving my blog as both sites are using the same platform:
CommunityServer. But since a couple of weeks I've heard a lot of very positive feedback on the recently deployed 2.0 version of
CommunityServer that powers the
MSDN and
TechNet blogger sites. So far the experience is far better than on DonNetJunkies. Today I finally decided to move my blog to
http://blogs.msdn.com/davbosch/. I want to thank
Donny for hosting my blog since August 2004.
So please subscribe to my new blog on the MSDN blogs:
Thanks for reading my blog and I hope you will continue to do so at http://blogs.msdn.com/davbosch/default.aspx!
WCF (Windows Communication Foundation / “Indigo”) and WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) have announced Go Live licenses, which allow customers to use the January Go Live releases of WCF and WF in their deployment environments.
More information about the Go Live program is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/getthebeta/golive/default.aspx
More information on this Go Live license and technical resources can be found on
Tim Sneath's blog:
The Vista “where to get the beta” site will also point to the WinFX Runtime January CTP.
On February 16th Microsoft Belux organizes a one day workshop that provides attendees with the essential knowledge around the .NET Web Services platform, today and tomorrow. In this workshop we'll have an in-depth discussion about service contracts, have a look at the core WSE 3.0 capabilities such as security, messaging and attachments and learn how “Windows Communication Foundation” (code-named “Indigo”) unified programming model will dramatically simplify the design and implementation of secure and reliable service-oriented applications.
This long-awaited workshop rounds up with a proposal on how to build services today that can be easily migrated to Windows Communication Foundation tomorrow.
When?
February 16th, 2006
Where?
BRAINS, Domaine Latour de Freins,
Rue Engeland 555,
B-1180 Brussels (Uccle)
Subscribe?
To attend this event, please register using one of those links :
Speaker
Beat Schwegler
Beat is employed as an Architect for Microsoft EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). In this capacity, he is supporting and consulting large companies in software architecture related topics and is a frequent speaker at international events and conferences.
He has more than 13 years of experience in professional software development and architecture and was involved in a wide variety of projects, ranging from real-time building control systems, best selling shrink-wrapped products to large scale CRM and ERP systems. For the last 3 years, his main focus was in the area of Service Orientation and Web Services.
Detailed Agenda
(this seminar will be delivered in English)
| 09:00 - 09:15 |
Introduction |
| 09:15 - 10:00 |
The Three Part Model and the 4 Tenets
We are going to discuss the “Three Part Model” and how a conceptualized view of the business drives service oriented analysis/design and how these artifacts can be transformed into services. In this scenario, the 4 tenets play a key role to express the needs and implications of the three different models. |
| 10:00 - 10:15 |
Break |
| 10:15 - 11:30 |
Guidance and Thoughts about Service Contracts
A contract is an agreement between two parties, namely between the service provider and the corresponding service consumer. It defines the structure of the exchanged data; it models the service interfaces and describes the different options to talk to these interfaces. The characteristic of contracts highly depend on the level of coupling between the consumer and the service. What is the common sense between them and which artifacts have to be explicitly defined? This session discusses the different aspects of a contract centric approach and explains approaches like "schema drives contract" or "contract drives schema". Contract first is the way to go, but how do you get there? |
| 11:30 - 11:45 |
Break |
| 11:45 - 13:00 |
Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0
WSE 2.0 considerably simplified the development and deployment of secure Web services by enabling developers to add message level security to applications built on the principles of service-orientation and the emerging Web Services (WS-*) specifications. This session details the WSE 3.0 release which adds significant new functionality including, enabling the ASMX programming model over multiple transports (e.g. http, tcp), substantially improved security policy to enable common security messaging scenarios, MTOM for message attachments, interoperability with Indigo and conformance to the latest WS specifications. |
| 13:00 - 14:00 |
Lunch |
| 14:00 - 15:15 |
Introducing WCF (Indigo) - The Unified Framework for Building Connected Systems
"Windows Communication Foundation" is Microsoft’s unified framework for building service-oriented applications. It enables developers to build secure, reliable, transacted solutions that integrate across platforms and interoperate with existing investments. "Indigo" combines and extends the capabilities of existing distributed systems technologies, including Enterprise Services, System.Messaging, .NET Remoting, ASMX, and WSE to deliver a unified development experience spanning distance, topologies, hosting models, protocols, and security models. This session will provide an overview of "WCF" and show you how "WCF" will simplify the development of connected systems. |
| 15:15 - 15:30 |
Break |
| 15:30 - 16:15 |
Proposal how to Build Services
This proposal demonstrates an approach to build service contracts and how they can be transformed into service implementations. We discuss the anatomy of contracts and services and use a factory-based approach to automate the creation of most implementation artifacts such as transport bindings. BTW, this session gives you an idea how a Software Factory may look like… |
| 16:15 - 16:30 |
Closing Note |
Participation fee
The fee to participate in the unique and long-awaited seminar is 195,-€ excl. VAT.
This fee includes the location, parking, coffee pauses, lunch, material … and an extreme knowledge opportunity!
Yasser Shohoud points to his WCF Architecture Overview. The article covers the fundamentals (endpoints, behaviors, service and channel descriptions and the WCF Runtime) and the code examples sections provides us with a few short code examples that illustrate these concepts covered in WCF Fundamentals.
This article is a must read for every Indigo/WCF developer! For those amongst us still not familar with WCF, Windows Communication Foundation is the official name for what was formerly code-named "Indigo".
Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code-named "Indigo") is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems. It is a new breed of communications infrastructure built around the Web services architecture. Advanced Web services support in Windows Communication Foundation provides secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability. The service-oriented programming model of Windows Communication Foundation is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and simplifies development of connected systems. Windows Communication Foundation unifies a broad array of distributed systems capabilities in a composable and extensible architecture, spanning transports, security systems, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies, and hosting models. Windows Communication Foundation will be available for Windows Vista™ (formerly code-named "Longhorn") as well as for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Jurgen Postelmans has written an interesting post "Integrating COM+ Components with the Windows Communication Foundation ('Indigo')". In this post Jurgen shows that WCF-enabled applications can communicate with legacy systems like COM+ Applications, MSMQ and ASP.NET Web Services. And surely it's also possible to expose WCF services to COM+ client applications!
Note also that he moved his blog to http://www.postelmans.org/blog/default.aspx!
Day 3 of the PDC05 was the day that some details on Atlas were unveiled. Check-out Scott Guthrie's lengthy posts on the topic: Atlas Unleashed and Atlas Keynote Walkthrough. In the breakout session PRS420 "ASP.NET: Future Directions for Developing Rich Web Applications with Atlas (Part 2)" Nikhil Kothari discussed the Atlas framework, how to package it into reusable blocks and how to use the server-side programming model (server controls) together with ASP.NET Atlas. The slides and demos are available for download from Nikhil's blog. Check also Dion Hinchcliffe's Blog for an excellent write-up on Atlas.
When looking at Microsoft's Virtual Earth site, Microsoft's Outlook Web Access e-mail client, and Start.com I think that Microsoft did a good job in packaging the different JavaScript libraries into ASP.NET Atlas. However all of this might be not be so easy to use given the amount of code to write and its complexity. This experience will probably be enhanced from now till RTM. Note that the version of ASP.NET Atlas that runs on top of beta 2 of the .NET Framework 2.0 is still a technology preview and won't RTM until next year.
On day 3 I also practiced a number of hands-on labs on the Windows Presentation Foundation and the Windows Workflow Foundation. The labs on WPF and especially the one using Sparkle showed very good the power of XAML and Sparkle for creating compelling user interfaces. Sparkle gives you access to buttons, menus and controls and lets you create animations through the timeline functionality. Sparkle isn't yet publicly available. The crashes experienced while using it (caused by Ctrl-Z or Undo functionality) explain why. But the proctors promised me that they're working on these knonw-issues.
The last day of PDC was a light one with the fun session "WCF + WPF = Magic" delivered by Doug Purdy & Chris Sells. The demo they did to show the power of both foundations normally wouldn't take any longer than 20 or 25 minutes. But these guys managed to get it cover the whole session. I never realized that showing DataBinding in Avalon through Indigo could be so funny ;-)!
Chris Sells has a new book out on "Programming the Windows Presentation Foundation". You can order it here.
PDC05 was just another great PDC. Lots and lots of new technology and deep technical content during all the week. Looking forward to Windows Vista and Office 12 (Server)!
pdc05