With the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) wave catching up in the industry, Microsoft has over the last few years developed several technologies for implementing SOA. There was a need to unify the existing technologies into a single unified model. With the introduction of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Microsoft has now come up with a new framework that unifies several existing models into a single coherent programming model to develop applications based on SOA. WCF is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems. In this article Poornachandra Sarang will provide an overview of this new framework and walk through the construction of a service and a client. He will also discuss several of the benefits offered by WCF.

Click here to read more

Following Morgan Skinner's introduction to Workflow Foundation, Tom Fischer delves more deeply under the hood of WF, explaining some of the issues you'll need to think about when using WF with ASP.NET 2.0, in particular focusing on using the WorkflowInstance and WorkflowRuntime objects in an ASP.NET environment. Tom also touches on service configuration, the design of activities and architectural issues for an enterprise workflow.

Click here to read more

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) provides an elegant method of adding extensibility to applications, whether those applications are rich client or web based. It consists of a runtime engine that executes workflows, a set of building blocks known as activities that are used to compose a workflow, and a set of services which are used at runtime which are used to support the workflow as it executes.

Workflows are perfect for exposing business logic as graphical flow-chart like models, and for providing hooks where custom code can be executed. This article will provide an introduction to how you can use Windows Workflow within your own applications, and show how common business scenarios can be accomplished.

Click here to read more

Rather than point you to another interesting happening out there on the web, today I thought I’d show you something from one of the book’s I’m currently editing. The book, as you’ll have guessed from the image is called Pro WPF: Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 3.0 and is being written by the extremely talented Matthew MacDonald.

The excerpt I’d like to show you comes from chapter 17 of the book and introduces the new WPF concept of Flow documents. Broadly, WPF seperates your docs into two types type-set documents for printing – fixed documents – and dynamic documents designed for viewing on a computer – flow documents.

I’ll let Matt take up the story…

Caveat: This excerpt’s not finished yet, it still needs another round of technical review, copy-edit and a few other bells and whistles before it’s ready for print. Also, we’re still working on the best way to convert them into HTML, so it’s a little rough around the edges. You’ll have to forgive any errors – the system will get a lot better very soon.

Click here to read more

Chad Campbell has posted an amazing example of using WPF/e to create a slider puzzle with live video running in each of the squares. You complete the puzzle and the video image is complete.

It’s not absolutely seamless, but I still think it’s great. He briefly explains how it works (loading the video nine times – one for each square – and defining each as a seperate Canvas then using the Clip property in conjunction with a mathemtatical offset (Canvas.Top and Canvas.Left) to determine what part of the video is visible to the user playing the game.

Source code is available, too, so if you’ve got the WPF/e SDK installed you can step through it for yourself.

There’s an interesting post on the WPFblog about the progress that’s been made with the speech API since the beta versions. Lee’s put together a (rather smart looking) app that Vista users can install via ClickOnce to demonstrate its capabilities.

Well worth checking out if you’ve got a few moments and a Vista machine. I’m not sure PC speech is going to take over the world just yet (remember the last time this was a hot topic in the mid 90’s?) but for specialist fields like call-centre switchboards, messaging services and medical prosthetics these APIs have got to be good news.

I won’t include a screenshot, as showing you an image of what a speech synthesizer looks like just seems daft!

Here’s an interesting project for anyone working in the JavaScript/Ajax world, or interested in authoring Vista Sidebar gadgets using C#.

Nikhil Kothari’s Script# project now provides a series of APIs that you can use to build Vista gadgets within WPF, along with a sample gadget (an MSDN search – potentially useful in itself) to help you on your way.

Yahoo have been showing off their next generation Messenger client recently (you can find the video here).

It’s been built specifically for Vista using both the .NET Framework and the full might of WPF working natively under the new OS. As of this month, WPF ceases to be an extension to the Framework and is incorporated into the .NET libraries proper – i.e. it’ll be part of the standard .NET redistributable SDK – along with WCF and (to a lesser extent) WF.

Click here to read more

There’s a new WPF blog available here. It doesn’t get updated all that frequently, which is perhaps why I missed this post from a couple of weeks back.

Click here to read more

Since the WPF/e CTP was released last week there have been a fair number of posts debating the relative merits of Microsoft’s new XAML-based technology over Adobe’s incumbent Flash technology.

Click here to read more

To end the week, here’s a quick pointer to a useful RSS feed for anyone following the maturation of Visual Studio and .NET ‘Orcas’ as it heads towards release in the second-half of 2007.

Click here to read more

It’s an ASP.NET 2.0 tool for generating and manipulating websites directly from database schema. You’ll find it in the asp.net sandbox here.

As you’ll have guessed from the name, rather than using SQL Server queries BLINQ relies on the forthcoming LINQ (Language Integrated Query) technology that’s being released as part of the .NET 3.0 Framework alongside Visual Studio ‘Orcas’ this coming summer/fall. I’ve been playing with it a little over the last few days and I must say that it’s rather good. If you’re developing web applications and have an instance of Visual Studio 2005 installed (Express will do), I suggest you give it a try. As the sandbox page says, you’ll need the May CTP of LINQ.

Click here to read more