WCF

5 Years as a Connected Systems Developer MVP

Rick G. Garibay — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 21:50:44 GMT

This morning I shared the fact that I received a pleasant email early this morning indicating that I have been awarded the MVP Award for Connected Systems Developer for my contributions throughout the 2011 award year.

It is hard to believe that this is my 5th consecutive award. The last 5 years have been filled with new challenges, roles and lots of excitement.

Five years is a significant timeframe in IT because historically, technology shifts pretty dramatically about every 5 years. I mused about the impact of HTML5 in my recent post, and how just 5 years ago WCF, WPF and Silverlight were brand new, bleeding edge technologies which were Microsoft’s response to a pivotal shift that was taking place in UX, design technology and service composition. Together, each of these technologies and other disruptions have served as a perfect storm for spawning the next major shift in technology: HTML5 and Cloud Computing. The interesting thing is just like 5 years ago, these technologies are still in their infancy. As I shared yesterday at HTML5 Web Camp, we are all getting in at the ground floor, and just as nothing remains constant but change itself, in another 5 years the technology landscape will look quite different than it does today. …And, just like the last 5 years, it will all happen in the blink of an eye.

There was a blog post earlier this year by a Security MVP who had renounced his award shortly after receiving it because he didn’t see the value in the award and thought that the program was asking too much. Surely, he had done all of the right things to get nominated and was even accepted, but yet (as the comments/feedback from other MVPs confirm) he completely missed the most valuable thing about the program: relationships. Over the last 5 years, I have made some great friends both in the community and the industry as a whole including Microsoft product, business and field groups, and content publishers like Microsoft, EPS/CODE Magazine, Pluralsight and SSWUG which have enriched my career and provided me with new and exciting challenges and opportunities. Most of all, over the last 5 years, these relationships have resulted in new, long-lasting friendships (you know who you are ) and this is truly the reward that transcends the award because it keeps on giving long after the champagne for a new award or re-award has been uncorked.

I have always felt that sharing and teaching is a privilege that comes with great responsibility and this another things that makes the MVP Award so rewarding. There is no question that I would have an impact in the community if I wasn’t an MVP, but equally, there is no question that the program has served to amplify my reach beyond what I could accomplish individually, and it continues to do so. The reality is that being an MVP in and of itself really means nothing. It’s what you do with it that counts.

So, I think it is fitting to take this opportunity to announce that I have just signed a book deal with Packt Publishing. I am honored to share this title with Hammad Rajjoub, fellow CSD MVP and now Architect Evangelist for Microsoft Singapore who really did all of the heavy lifting and was kind enough to present the opportunity to me. Hammad and I both share a passion for Connected Systems and community, and this is a great opportunity for us to share our experience, thoughts and learnings for how the capabilities provided by Windows Server AppFabric can benefit architects and developers building distributed systems today using WCF and WF on the Microsoft platform with an eye towards Hybrid architectures. We will be sharing more details as the shape of the book starts to take form, and if you would be interested in being a technical reviewer, we would be very grateful.

Needless to say, it’s going to be a very busy fall/winter, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!

WCF, WF and WF Services V.Next

Rick G. Garibay — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 17:44:43 GMT

The Application Server Platform team (the team responsible for WCF and WF, who I affectionately still refer to as the Connected Framework team) has been hard at work on futures since before the release of .NET 4. And while the new feature area announcements made public today may not share the same spotlight as higher layers of the AppFabric onion, they are a welcome addition to the framework that continue to build on the theme of productivity ushered in the 4.0 release.

No doubt, some of these features should have made it within 4.0, but others are careful tuning; the result of direct feedback from customers, developers, MVPs and Business Platform Technology Advisors for making a fantastic set of technologies for exposing and composing applications both on-premise and in the cloud even better.

Developers who prefer C# (such as myself) will welcome the addition of C# support to WF expressions. In truth, while at first I balked at the omission, I became used to the VB syntax much in the same way that I accepted the light C-style syntax in the BizTalk Expression Editor. That said, if I had a dollar for every time I got a validation error for adding the impulsive semicolon after initializing a variable, I’d have a higher balance in my bank account.

The community has protested about the absence of a State Machine Activity in WF 4 v1 ever since the first SDR when it’s omission was benevolently declared. However, the team has made this highly coveted activity available for evaluation in CTP form for some time, and it sounds like it is getting further baked, though no suggestion was made that it would RTM out-of-band.

@ronljacobs did a nice job showing off the designer, and it appeared that there have been some enhancements to the UX since the CTP. Additions such as compile-time semantic error checking (i.e. ensuring a state is connected to at least one transition state) and an intuitive composition experience whereby connections are made between states by simply nudging one state shape to the other and dropping a state on an existing connector to join the transition as an intermediary are very nice enhancements. Annotations, essentially the ability to add PowerPoint style comments on activities will be very helpful for scattering “WTF?’s”, I mean comments :-) within workflows for documentation as well as aiding in design/code reviews. These essentially become declarative TODOs, which as Ron showed are searchable and clicking each annotation brings you to the activity which is tagged. A big kudos to @mwinkle and team on this body of work as I know Matt has been working hard and actively soliciting and listening to the community and influencing investments based on this feedback for several months.

Speaking of activities, there are a number of very early non-control flow activites that made their first public appearance, including a set of data activities that make it easy to invoke SQL statements and stored procedures (ExecuteSqlQuery<T>, ExecuteSqlQuery and ExecuteSqlNonQuery). To be honest, I have mixed feelings about these activities. While you can certainly compose these activities within domain-specific activities, I think that they make it far to easy for developers to build kitchen sink outer activities that will have a tendency for abuse on the mainline. Of course, patterns alone don’t ship software, working software ships software, but just as I shudder to see references to System.Data in the business layer, the concepts of domain-specific encapsulation are really a key value proposition to declaratively orchestrating activities in a manner that reflects the intent of a workflow. Hopefully the guidance will remain to think about potential for reuse of every activity and consider taking advantage of the productivity benefits of these new data activities while not giving up intuitive composition.

Interestingly, I am more comfortable with the SendMail activity, whose purpose is self-explanatory. Perhaps this is because unlike DAL-specific activities, I’ve written one too may SMTP code activities. In truth though, I will likely stick with my own for demo purposes because the PickupDirectoryLocation technique taught to me by my friend and fellow MVP @Milnertweet of @pluralsight fame is just plain wicked.

There are also a number of new Messaging activities coming that are reflective of Microsoft’s full embracing of REST style composition (more on that shortly) including an HttpGet, HttpPost, HttpPut and HttpDelete activity. These will offer a nice alternative to dropping down to a code activity to issue a GET or a POST, making banging on an ODATA or POX feed easier than ever while allowing folks to debate the RESTfulness of their workflows in a fully declarative manner :-)

Workflow Services

Further evidence of the team listening and responding to feedback is the much anticipated support for contract-first Workflow Services. Many including myself have been very vocal about this. In WF 4 v1, you define your contract via properties on the Receive activity and the WSDL is generated based on these properties. This is the equivalent of slapping a ServiceContract attribute on a concrete type, which on my teams results in an instance electric shock being administered to the errant developer. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, and while in WCF there is no excuse for this, in WCF 4 v1, it is the only way to expose a WCF service. Contract-First WF allows you to browse your assemblies or projects and choose an existing interface, ensuring that factoring decisions can continue to take place outside of the WF designer while embracing the pillars of separation of interface definition from implementation. The result of browsing and selecting an existing Service Contract is the generation of one activity per operation, the workflow way.

Versioning has been an interesting problem for as long as technologies have provided the ability to persist and resume application state. The canonical problem is this that if you persist the state of a workflow and in between the time it was persisted and later resumed, a new version of the workflow definition is deployed, what happens? The short answer is an exception indicating that you are asking the WF runtime to try to fit a round hole into a square peg. Leon Welicki (PM on the WF team and one of the nicest guys on earth) and team have found a solid solution which is to redirect, or bind a persisted workflow to the appropriate definition at runtime, and this is what Versioning and Dynamic Update do for you. By giving your workflow a name and version, you can map instances to that named instance, solving the versioning problem without giving up the performance benefits of keeping the definition and instance state as peas in the same pod.

Ron also provided a teaser for what the goodness of the Container in the Composition Model might do for Workflow Services. One area in particular he focused on was the ability to monitor WF instances, and I couldn’t help but compare it to HAT orchestration debugging in the BTS world. I can only hope that this capability will be available both on-premise as well as in the cloud, as the fidelity of features and workloads within AppFabric appear to be landing towards a single hybrid platform in which both WF and WCF play key roles.

WCF

While the slow uptick of developers embracing .NET workflow can be attributed largely in part to the nascent release of WF 4 v1 among the firehouse of new technologies release this year, WCF as a technology came out strong from the beginning and has only gotten better and better since its debut in .NET 3.0. As my hands down favorite .NET technology, I’ve worked very hard to understand why developers have such a hard time with WCF, but for reasons I still don’t fully understand, there is an intimidation factor in WCF that is difficult to reconcile. The team has worked hard to make the barrier to entry with WCF as low as possible, delivering significant improvements to the developer experience in WCF 4, including configuration-less F5 hosting, improvements in REST support and out-of-the-box support for WS-Discovery and message brokering via the Routing Service.

While admittedly a WS guy at the core, I cannot dispute that there is a need for different tools for every job, and WCF has remained true to its vision for delivering service-oriented enablement of applications across a variety of formats and styles. To this end, @gblock has taken some time away from slinging MEF to explore and deliver new ways of enabling developers to use WCF to expose resources of virtually any type over HTTP, transcending the boundaries that WS or even REST styles impose.

For example, by embracing the capabilities of the HTTP protocol, Glenn and his team are working to make it very easy to serve up content based on the encoding type defined in the HTTP header of a GET request. The implementation is reminiscent of the ActionResult API in MVC by which you can bind a requested content-type to a specialized response stream such as a JSONResul or XMLResult, however the new enhancements take it much farther by providing a very simple approach for serving up content of any supported content type, be it POX, PNG or PDF. Like WCF Data Services, these investments on top of WCF will allow developers of all backgrounds to take advantage of a simpler model for exposing and consuming multiple resource types in a very direct and lightweight manner.

Wrap Up

All of these features are welcome addition to the framework, and while there is no guarantee that everything discussed here will be be part of the next official shipping vehicle (what that is remains unclear), it is evidence that the team is continuing to move in the right direction, not only listening, but more importantly acting upon what the community is asking for.

You can download and explore the beta of the new WCF Web APIs that Glenn covered here: http://wcf.codeplex.com/ and as I mentioned earlier, CTP 1 for WF State Machine is available here: http://wf.codeplex.com/releases/view/43586.

There are no public announcements as to when we might expect the next rev of the State Machine CTP or the new WF goodies discussed above, however be sure to keep up with the WF team at http://msdn.microsoft.com/wf, endpoint.tv on channel9 http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/endpoint/ and stay tuned for “Endpoint Radio” a new podcast by Ron himself making its debut shortly.

Desert Code Camp 2010.1 – The Goods

Rick G. Garibay — Thu, 20 May 2010 02:16:02 GMT

This was a great event as usual, and I really have to hand it to @jguadango, @coneybeer, Devry University and all the volunteers for putting this together. The logistics, facilities, scheduling and planning for 55+ sessions is not easy.

I’ve presented at every Desert Code Camp since the very first one, so I think this one makes 6 or 7. Code Camp is always a great day to interact with Phoenix’s community of technologists through conversation, teaching and learning and this one was no exception.

Below are the goods for each session, and as promised I’ve included videos of my WCF and AppFabric Service Bus demos.

Session

Content

Code

Demo Vids

Let the Good Guys in with Azure AppFabric Service Bus

Demo1: Unicast One-Way Messaging with NetOneWayRelay Binding

Demo 2: Multicast On-Way Messaging with NetRelayBinding

Demo 3: World Peace & Fireworks with NetTcpRelayBinding (HD)

Beyond the Whiteboard: Enforcing Conceptual Integrity with Visual Studio 2010

N/A

New Features in WCF 4 that will Instantly Make you More Productive

Demo 1: Convention over Configuration (HD)

Demo 2: Dynamic Endpoint Discovery (HD)

Demo 3: Monitoring Service Availability with WS-Discovery Announcements (HD)

If you have any comments or questions, drop me a line.

AZ.NET UG WCF 4.0 Materials

Rick G. Garibay — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:46:17 GMT

Below please find my presentation and demos from my talk on new productivity features in WCF 4.0 at the AZ .NET User Group.

Thanks to Scott Cate and the AZ.NET UG for hosting me- I had lots of fun!

Byte-Size WCF Episode 1: Default Endpoints in WCF 4.0

Rick G. Garibay — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:35:27 GMT

WCF 4.0 simplifies the configuration experience significantly by providing a new default endpoint feature. This saves time and simplifies the configuration requirements for hosting a WCF service by providing a File –> New Project –> Code –> F5 hosting experience.

In this episode you’ll learn how to get up and running quickly with default endpoints and how to gain more control over the default bindings for each scheme (HTTP, TCP, MSMQ, etc) you may want to configure using the new protocol mapping capabilities in WCF 4.0.

Is .NET a Great Disruptor of the Decade?

Rick G. Garibay — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:08:53 GMT

The following article was recently brought to my attention. It asks if .NET should be considered a disruptor in the last decade: http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=3921

I actually gave this a bit of thought and the best answer I was able to come up with was “Yes and No”. Here’s why…

A technology can be "disruptive" when it gains wide spread attention but can fizzle out just as quickly or over an undetermined period of time. How deep into a revolution a technology can sink its teeth and still emerge a clear winner is a true long term measure that I believe earns the designation of "disruptor".

A true market leader leverages (or themselves are responsible for) a revolutionary technology and both exploits it fully while surviving several aftershocks that typically follow.

For example, I would argue that SOA was a revolutionary innovation that changed the mindset of an industry. In the process it displaced many traditional (and proprietary) approaches to distributed computing and a new market segment exploded.

I think Microsoft capitalized on this with ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX) which at the time I would certainly consider disruptive- offering 1st generation commodity SOA to the masses- but had the innovation wave stopped there, Microsoft wouldn't have a SOA story today.

Enter WCF . WCF is both an evolution over ASMX as well as a technology that has been successful in displacing many proprietary incumbents. However I think today what we have is a low-end disruption because it is evident that WCF overshot the market with performance and features. Incredibly, almost in perfect harmony with this market perception REST came into its own and disrupted our whole perspective on SOA and continues to challenge our values in the process (as all disruptive technologies do).

WCF 3.5 and the REST Starter Kit answered this call cementing the fact that .NET (WCF) is deep enough to survive and subsume other distrubtions and at the same time, WCF 4 will attempt to democratize WCF for the masses, likely gaining both mindshare and market share in the process.

So, while .NET has been disruptive, I don't know that we can claim it as disruptor just yet.

One thing is for certain. Azure has the potential to propel .NET to a more profitable market segment ushering with it new market disruption and establishing .NET in a clear lead position.

But these are just my thoughts. What do you think?

Desert Code Camp November 7th

Rick G. Garibay — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:11:22 GMT

I will be speaking at DCC on November 7th on the following topics:

Developing and Deploying an On-Premise .NET Application with Azure Table Storage
Developing and Deploying a WCF Application with Azure Compute Services and Azure Table Storage

There are several excellent sessions this time around, including talks from fellow colleagues at Neudesic like Michael Collins, Joel Neubeck and Andrew Wilson.

Hope to see you there!

.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Announcements

Rick G. Garibay — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:30:00 GMT

.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available to MSDN subscribers as of 9:30 AM PST. This release includes the new version of Connected Framework products like WCF and WF 4.0, Entity Framework 4.0 and a host of additional new features across work streams including MEF, Parallel Extensions, and significant enhancements to Visual Studio Team System and Team Build.

Having spent some time with both WCF and WF limited CTP, Beta and pre-Beta 2 bits, this release includes significant improvements, re-design and new features specifically around WCF and WF 4.0. If you are like me, you will likely welcome many of the designer enhancements in WF 4.0 and may lament a number of designer design changes within messaging activities. You’ll just need to rip off the shrink wrap on Beta 2 to find out yourself!

I plan to start doing a significant amount of writing around WF 4.0 because I think that having been re-written from the ground up, WF 4.0 addresses many, many of the pain points in the 3.0 and 3.5 version, and I believe that WF + WCF 4.0 will lower the barrier of entry for writing workflow and service/model-oriented applications. In addition, the improvements within Workflow Services and the ease with which those new to WCF can get a service up and running are both significant and necessary to increasing the reach of these fantastic technologies.

Another major area of VS 2010 I am excited about is in the new architecture and design tools in Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010 Architecture Edition which introduces new UML designers, use cases, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams and the ability to explore and visualize existing code, design and apply layering to enforce dependency rules, and physical designers to visualize, analyze, and refactor your software. In May of the year, I demonstrated how VS 2010 extends UML logical views into physical views of your code along with how to create relationships from these views to work items and project metrics, and how to programmatically transform models into patterns for other domains and disciplines.

Needless to say, I’m excited about VS 2010 Beta 2, and am even more excited to announce that the official launch of Visual Studio 2010 will take place on March 22nd, 2010.

Until then, you can download Beta 2 on October 21st here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx

Some other notes of interest:

Microsoft is announcing a new, streamlined packaging lineup and licensing options for Visual Studio 2010 and MSDN. This includes an "Ultimate Offer" to help customers upgrade to the latest developer tools. For more information on the new packaging, licensing, and pricing of Visual Studio 2010, visit: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=166249
As you may have noticed, MSDN has undergone a significant redesign which includes new benefits for all MSDN subscribers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

March 22nd will be here before you know it, so jump on the Beta 2 bits now and get ready!

Oh, and don’t forget, PDC 2009 is right around the corner. Register now for key insights you just won’t find at any other conference: http://microsoftpdc.com/

Speaking at Ultimate Virtual Conference on October 22

Rick G. Garibay — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:14:09 GMT

I will be speaking at the SQL Server Worldwide User Group Ultimate Virtual Conference on October 22.

If you haven’t experienced an Ultimate Virtual Conference, it is very similar to other industry conferences. There are a number of tracks including .NET, SQL and MOSS and sessions are scheduled on specific days.

Unlike traditional conferences, however, you don’t have to leave the comfort of your home or office to attend. All sessions are streamed in HD video at the scheduled time. Speakers are available via live chat during the initial screening of their sessions and then you can watch the sessions again and again.

I will be delivering the following two sessions:

Developing and Deploying an On-Premise .NET Application with Azure Table Storage

Azure Table Storage provides a scalable data access solution for applications hosted on-premise or in the Azure cloud. Learn how to get up and running with Table Storage with a look at building entities, provisioning Table Storage locally in Development Storage and in Azure Table Storage along with techniques for maintaining a consistent development experience when developing locally or against the cloud.

Developing and Deploying a WCF Application with Azure Compute Services and Azure Table Storage.

The Azure Compute Service provides robust hosting capabilities of you .NET application in the Azure operating system. Learn about Web Roles and Worker Roles and how to configure your .NET application for deployment to Windows Azure. We will also explore techniques for consuming data via Azure Table Storage and put at all together and deploy the application live to Windows Azure.

My colleague Brendon Birdoes of Neudesic will also be presenting the following sessions:

ESB Toolkit 2.0 Overview

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an architectural pattern and a key enabler in implementing the infrastructure for a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The ESB Toolkit for BizTalk Server 2009 implements best practices and patterns for building loosely coupled service oriented solutions using BizTalk as the bus. The ESB Toolkit 2.0 is one of the best new features of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009! Join Brendon as he explains what the ESB Toolkit is, explores the features and capabilities and discusses the benefits of using the Toolkit for your BizTalk solutions.

Implementing Messaging Solutions Using ESB Toolkit 2.0

Itinerary based routing is the key pattern in delivering solutions in the ESB Toolkit 2.0. The challenge though is how to take a traditional BizTalk scenario and implement it using the ESB Toolkit and itinerary based routing. This session will walk through a real world scenario and iteratively build the solution from a simple itinerary to a more complex itinerary including some of the more advanced capabilities of the Toolkit. This session will also take a closer look at the best new feature of the ESB Toolkit which is the Itinerary Designer that is fully integrated into Visual Studio 2008. If you are a BizTalk developer and would like to get an idea of the Toolkit development experience, this is a must see.

For a complete list of sessions and speakers, go to http://www.vconferenceonline.com/shows/fall09/uvc/

~~I have a limited amount of discount codes I can give out so feel free to contact me via email or @rickggaribay on twitter and I will set you up.~~

Please feel free to use discount code SPRGUVC09 for $25 off registration discount.

PCSUG Meeting this Thursday: Developing and Deploying a WCF Application with Azure Compute Services and Azure Table Storage

Rick G. Garibay — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:11:48 GMT

I will be speaking at the PCSUG this Thursday on how to design, develop and deploy a WCF application for Windows Azure. I’ll demonstrate configuration for testing locally in the development fabric as well as development storage and wrap up with deployment to Compute Service and Table Storage.

Pizza and sodas at 5:30 pm, and we’ll kick off at 6:00 pm and go until 7:30 pm.

Hope to see you there!

Slides and demo code are now available here: http://pcsug.org/Home/Events