Human-Debugger.net - WinFX|WCF

Dev Academy 3 - download the lectures

Shani Raba — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:04:19 GMT

Dev Academy 3 just finished, but if you feel you missed a lecture or maybe missed the whole day, you can sit back download the code and full length lectures.

You can find everything in here http://www.microsoft.com/israel/msdn/devacademy3/2.aspx.
Pay attention: while the presentation were written in English, the session all of them were in Hebrew but you can also enjoy the code.

I recommend on this lectures:

Dev301, Eyal Vardi lectures about Http Web Services: Great performer, good subject, lots of code
Dev 402, Sasha Goldshtein lectures about Concurrent Programming: I didn't like his style, but still some great samples.
Arc 301, Yair Siwek lectures about "Velocity": Great performer, funny guy. You must watch this session.

Enjoy.

TechEd Eilat 2008 - Day 1

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:51:47 GMT

Almost a week after tech-ed but It's better late than never.
Very early this morning we start our way to Eilat, the gang of four I called it, Gabbi Soler (aka. MC. Soler), Doron Yaakobi, Yoav Michaeli and I.

Night before TechEd Doron at the morning of The first day

This 5 hours were tremendous, sunny day, cool partners and great subjects for talking, we argued almost about everything, the only thing we agreed about is that we are not agree about anything. Here are some of the subjects for debates:

Design using UML VS. Test driven Design Vs. Word-API-design
SOA as a one-entrance-point to (varying) many applications Vs. One Big Application
Project management - what are the management differences between a small project to a large(huge) one - from scrum-lovers point of view

The next 3-days are going to be a great fun, as a beginning enjoy the view:

The Beauty of Israel #1 - on our way to Eilat

The Beauty of Israel #2 - Still on our way to Eilat...

After almost 5 hours of driving (by Yoav) we finally got to Eilat, at the registration point we got a laptop-bag as a welcome-gift and we went to the opening plenum.
Than we finally start learning, here are the 3 lectures I chose to be at for my first day:

Odyssey in SOA - A Voyage through (by Manu Cohen-Yashar)
Manu explained about the SOA using the MS Tools around us, there are plenty of them and I am sure that such lecture is a great start for the SOA & S+S 3-days-session.
Some of the buzz that were thrown out there are: using ESB for Dynamic routing instead of coding that solution by yourself, I've heard for the first time about ISB - Internet Service bus and Oslo as MS-new-to-come solution. Manu also demonstrate a cool tool by AmberPoint here are some of their products: SOA Monitoring, AmberPoint Express.
Those products can show you everything you would like to know about your services even time of calling, number of errors and flow of calls of each message, this tools can solve many problems when using WF & WCF together. anyway I like the lecture, it was a good start for me cause we are start using WCF & SOA in more places at our systems. anyway there were samples that I wanted to see its code or WF Creations it could be even clearer than its explanations.
My grade to Manu's lecture: 8/10.

SOAP\WS* and REST (by David Chappell)
David Chappell had a great show at teched He is a great presenter and he knows how to take some boring subject and make it interesting.
The lecture was talked about the two approaches for Web-Services, the WS* approach and the Rest API. When using WCF you are using, in generally, the WS* approach, with this approach we can choose to use the Reliability, Transactions, Policy etc., but we never asked whether we really need all this stuff in our Web-Services? If your answer is not, so why won't we decrease the size of the request and the response and have something more human-readable such as: REST, (you can read more here).
You can use the simply URI and HTTP methods (Get, Post, Delete etc.) and get back a simple XML, RSS, Json etc. there is no need to send or receive Soap Messages.
In WCF you can easily use the WebGet, WebInvoke, and the ResponseFormat property. I Recommend you to search for the lecture presentation, I would post here link when I'll find it, anyway this is what he said as a conclusion: Rest - can be a good choice for exposing data over web services, SOAP - can be a good choice for exposing logic\operation.

David Chappell in Action - Explaining its lecture agenda.

My grade to David's lecture is 10/10, maybe this is because of the accent-charm but it is a must lecture for those who want to learn about the REST and the WCF connectivity.

SQL Server 2008 - what's new in Analysis services
I believe in knowledge, I also believe in learning more tools\products\architecture, so I went to this lecture from the BI session, after half an hour I've found this boring while the presenters only compare between the 2005 to the 2008 version, so I can't even give a short description from this one.

This is me picturing myself, before the cocktail party (or maybe after...)

After this lecture we went to the cocktail party where I first found Oren Ellenbogen and Aviel. I really missed Oren and it was great to see him and lots fun with them both.

More on the second day at my next posts.

Using WcfSvcHost.exe to run your services

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:18:30 GMT

I've read Avi Wortzel's great post "Host Multiple services in windows service". Avi create his own Windows Service which on start knows to also start other services such as: Simple Windows Service and WCF Service.
At my place one of my developers, Elad (blog-less), wrote a spike for running our own Windows Service which can manage all Wcf Services in a given dll, (we didn't like the usage of IService which cause us to change the Wcf Service and implement a specific methods for windows - while the WCF team works hard to cause the framework to be generic to all hosts) . In Elad's solution we will iterate over the dll's classes which had the [ServiceContractAttribute] above it. And now: while turning on\off the main (windows) Service it will also start\shutdown all existing WCF Services.

Today I dig a little bit the MSDN and the IDE directory and found WcfSvcHost.Exe which also knows to start\stop all Wcf Services in a given DLL.
This one is great, it even had its own UI to manage each service by itself.

Here you can see me running Wortzel's WcfService using WcfSvcHost.exe with no code written at all.

I didn't test the whole functionality of this application, but it looks good enough for your basic services and samples, I still believe that on sophisticated scenarios we will still need to use Avi's-like-code.

ArcDeveloper Dev

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:39:07 GMT

There is a new (google) group for the ArcDeveloper.Net (or may we call it Alt-ESRI)
Help us to give you a better API.

WCF Presentation & Hands on Labs

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:20:12 GMT

Last Thursday Nati & I gave two days lecture (as I've already talked about last week)

The first was day dedicated to explain SOA buzz & the WCF basic samples to resolve the plumbing's Hell.
The second day was dedicated to a deep_WCF_dive.
We also had two Hands On Labs samples to assist the students in practicing the daily issues.

Here you can find the two presentations (day #1, day #2) you can also read more about the two days course at Nati's post.

For me it was the first time doing such lecture & HOL - I had a great time and would probably do it again...

The presentations were inspired by:

Juval Lowy's IDesign temple
Oren Ellenbogen for some great images (taken from his presentation about Code Templating)
Justin Smith which we use his WCF lecture at Tech-Ed as the template to our presentation.

AutoCache in WCF

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 20:46:06 GMT

Great post by Nati Dobkin on Extending the Caching of the Service Operations.
I didn't test it yet, but I like the simplicity in the usage...

Good job, Enjoy the code.