.NET Meanderings - LINQ

Speaking at Oredev

Richard Blewett — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:45:26 GMT

I'm going to be doing a couple of sessions at the Oredev conference in Sweden in November

Writing REST based Systems with .NET

For many, building large scale service based systems equate to using SOAP. There is, however, another way to architect service based systems by embracing the model the web uses - REpresentational State Transfer, or REST. .NET 3.5 introduced a way of building the service side with WCF - however you can also use ASP.NET's infrastructure as well. In this session we talk about what REST is, two approaches to creating REST based services and how you can consume these services very simply with LINQ to XML.

Writing Service Oriented Systems with WCF and Workflow

Since its launch WCF has been Microsoft's premier infrastructure to writing SOA based systems. However one of the main benefits of Service Orientation is combining the functionality of services to create higher order functionality which itself is exposed as a service - namely service composition. Workflow is a very descriptive way of showing how services are combined and in .NET 3.5 Microsoft introduced an integration layer between WCF and Workflow to simplify the job of service composition. In this session we examine this infrastructure and bring out both its string and weak points with an eye to what is coming down the line in Project Oslo - Microsoft's next generation of its SOA platform.

Hope to see you there

Demos from Software Architect 2008 Precon

Richard Blewett — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:02:07 GMT

As promised, here are the demos from the precon myself and Dave Wheeler (get a blog Dave) did at Software Architect 2008. It was a fun day talking about security, WCF, WF, Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, Ajax, ASP.NET MVC, LINQ and Oslo

DotNetForArchitects.zip (791.24 KB)

There is a text file in the demos directory in the zip that explains the role of each of the projects in the solution

Edit: Updated the download link so hopefully the problems people have been experiencing will be resolved

Kev solves the SQL Server Tools Mystery

Richard Blewett — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:25:51 GMT

I use my machine for development and research as well as teaching. Originally I only installed VS2005 and SQL Express. I later installed VS 2008. Finally I installed BizTalk (which required a full-blown SQL Server install) and thought nothing more of it.

More recently I was checking into how LINQ to SQL was doing some things and realised I couldn't find SQL Server Profiler on my machine - in fact I couldn't find any of the SQL Server tools! I googled this a bit and found this was a well known issue with installing SQL Express before SQL Server. So I resigned myself to sorting this out on the next repave.

I was talking to Kev Jones about this issue at DevWeek last week and yesterday he pops up and tells me he's solved it. Kev had the cunning idea of actually reading the SQL Server installation warning messages - which apparently tell you exactly what to do.

You can read Kev's post about it here