Last Thursday I attended a Visug seminar about WCF. This session was presented by Juwal Lowy, a dedicated and well known employee of IDesign. The session was great, really great. Juwal's a great presenter that could even make the belgian crowd to laugh on several occasions. That might seem strange but most foreign speakers know how hard it is to interact with a Belgian audience that mostly doesn't make sound and watches the presentation with a lot of interest. I've already followed several WCF presentations during the last years (TechEd, tech days, ...) but this one was actually the one I liked best. Most presentations show a host and a client and then dive right into the config files. Not this one. We got shown little chunks at a time and more about the architecture. Not so much configuration but small samples which showed the stuff. I liked this approach a lot.

Grz, Kris.

Hi,

just found out about this sample application: .NET StockTrader Sample Application.

This application is an end-to-end sample application for .NET Enterprise Application Server technologies. It is a service-oriented application based on Windows Communication Foundation (.NET 3.0) and ASP.NET, and illustrates many of the .NET enterprise development technologies for building highly scalable, rich "enterprise-connected" applications. It is designed as a benchmark kit to illustrate alternative technologies within .NET and their relative performance. The application offers full interoperability with J2EE and IBM WebSphere's Trade 6.1 sample application. As such, the application offers an excellent opportunity for developers to learn about .NET and building interoperable, service-oriented applications.

Since the weather in Belgium isn't that great at the moment I think I know what I'll be checking out the next week.

Grz, Kris.

Hi,

most ASP.NET developers probably already know that there's a wealth of information to be found under the Learn tab of the ASP.NET website. There's video material covering these subjects:

“How Do I?” with ASP.NET AJAX
“How Do I?” with ASP.NET
SQL Server 2005 Express for Beginners
Videos for ASP.NET 2.0 Beginners
“First Look” Videos
Videos on Visual Studio 2005 Add-ins
Videos on Migrating to ASP.NET

Also I found out that there's also some other interesting video material out there: http://blogs.interfacett.com/dan-wahlins-blog/. It has several nice videos on creating and calling web services, C# delegates & events, creating a webservice with WCF, ... Be sure to check it out.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday I visited the .NET Framework 3.0 Development event provided by Microsoft. It was a great introduction to the new upcoming technologies: WPF, Cardspace, WCF and WF.

The first 2 sessions were presented by Peter Himschoot, a regional director for Belgium. The last 2 were presented by Ingo Rammer, the known Austrian regional director.

My impression: WPF looks way cool. It looks quite flexibel and the 3D effects were also looking great. Peter also showed us a WPF application running sandboxed in Internet Explorer and apparently this is called an XBAP application.

CardSpace looks promising but I still need to see it in practice. If it can live up to the expectations it could have a very bright future though.

Then Ingo showed us WCF and later on WF. This was for me the first time I saw WF in action. Boy did I wish I could already use it in my current project, it would a great time saver for the workflows I need to implement.

The last session, and also the most interesting probably, was the one where WCF and WF were used together. I just checked Ingo's blog and as he promised he uploaded the slides and demo applications. You can download them here.

Grz, Kris.

I got these via Tom Mertens' blog:

• Introducing Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), CardSpaces (previously InfoCard) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
• Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

Grz, Kris.

I just found out about the existence of this newly dedicated site: netfx3. After blogging already about the renamed WinFX to .NET 3.0 framework name it seems Microsoft's dedicated to the new naming.

Grz, Kris.

Just read .NET Framework 3.0 at Somasegar's blog.

It's just rebranding of the name Microsoft pushed as WinFX, because behind the scenes it seems to be the same .NET 2.0 framework as we're having now, but with added value: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows CardSpace (WCS).

I'm already looking forward to .NET 4.0. Are you?

Update: another article by Brad Abrams is online too: Toward .NET Framework 3.0....

Grz, Kris.