Playing around with Windows 7 beta, I had trouble with the Media Player. The player seems to hang. That is, the library was not shown and the “hour glass” was displayed when I was moving the mouse pointer over the media player. And I was not able to end the Media Player process in the Task Manager.
After some digging, I found the solution to fix the trouble with the media player. That is, it worked for me.
In the control panel, there is a entry for find and fix problems:
Selecting this functionality, takes you to the troubleshoot tool. There you have to select “view all”.
In the next window you be able to “troubleshoot” the “Windows Media Player Library” and the “Windows Media Player Settings” by clicking it.
After this troubleshooting the media player works fine again.
On the .NET platform we have several possible solutions to build a RESTful services. Three of them are:
I have tried to figure out when to use which solution to build a RESTful service. Conclusion: I could not find a reasonable set of rules to determine which technology to use. Maybe this will be a start:
- ASP.NET MVC gives full control of your implementation of the RESTful service, but you have to build much plumbing code yourself.
- WCF REST provides REST functionality (including RSS and ATOM) out of the box. There is no need to do the serializing and deserializing yourself.
- If the service will focus on CRUD operations on Entities ADO.NET Data Services is good choice.
Feel free to add additional information on this topic.
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TechEd 2008,
GenevaI have visit two sessions about “Geneva”. One done by David Chappell and one by Vittorio Bertocci.
Geneva (previously “Zermatt”) is the claim-based identity platform Microsoft is working on. In a claimed-based platform, you need 3 things:
- A Security Token Service (STS) that provides tokens (with claims). Read here about tokens and claims.
- An identity library
- An identity selector
Microsoft provides us with “Geneva” server (STS), “Geneva” framework (identity library) and “Geneva” Cardspace (identity selector). The best thing is that the platform supports open standards WS-Trust and SAML (2.0). This is great news, because with support for these open standards, it is possible to use a STS or a card selector from other vendors. Your are not tied-up to Microsoft.
After the sessions, the first thing I got in my mind was the 
for companies implementation in I did 3 years ago. DigiD is a sort of STS of the Dutch government. But … it only provides an authentication service (there are no any other claims possible). After authentication the application get a KvK-number (KvK = Chamber Of Commerce). And there we have the problem with DigiD. You have to implement additional stuff for Authorization and/or other claims.
Hopefully they (the DigiD organization) will look at the SAML and WS-Trust open standards and upgrade their system to make more claims possible. If they do, I believe the DigiD platform will be more successful.
This session, done by David Chapell (very good and humorous speaker), does not have any demos. But, David explains very well what Oslo, Dublin and WF is all about.
The three technologies can be used together or separate of each other. WF is all about workflows (sequential or state machines). Dublin is an extension on Windows Application Server to host WF and WCF services. Oslo is the new modeling platform.
With WF developers are able to create long-running applications. To enable this long-running feature, WF persist the state of the running Workflow. WF makes it also much easier to do activities in parallel. WF 4.0 comes with a new designer, new activities (for accessing data and invoking Powershell cmdlets) and the Flowchart workflow. This is a workflow that is between a sequential workflow and the state machine workflow. David promises that WFF 4.0 has a much better performance.
Dublin provides the following features for hosting workflows and WCF Services. It provides:
- A scalable host
- Built-in persistence
- Management tools
- Auto start services
- Restart service instances
- Message forwarding (this helps with service versioning)
- Tracking
Dublin or BizTalk.
- Dublin is designed to host WF workflows and WCF services. Nothing more.
- BizTalk is about integration. Integration of LOB applications.
Oslo is about models. It provides a general purpose modeling platform. With Oslo you can model a “Business Process”, a WF workflow, data structures (data model), services etc. Oslo comes with a repository that stores schemas and instances of the schemas. The modeling language has the codename “M” and there is a modeling tool. “M” consists of “MSchema” and “MGrammer”. With MSchema you be able to define schemas and model relations between schemas. “MGammer” is a textual DSL (like SQL, regular expressions and MSchema) that can be parsed. MSchema is defined in MGrammer. Robert Jan van Holland did some things with MGrammer. Read his post here.
Oslo comes with Quadrant. In this tool you can create models like “business process” models and “WF workflow” models. I had made some photos of Quadrant, but I was not able to get them from my mobile phone ;-((.
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TechEd 2008,
DublinMark Berman provides the demos about “Dublin”. Dublin is a set of extensions on top of Windows Application Server (WAS), that helps to host and monitor WF and WCF services. With Dublin developers don’t have to care about the infrastructure to host WF and WCF services. It is simply some configuration within WAS to host these services. With providing WF persisting, “Dublin” makes your WF application very scalable.
There is no relation with the Azure platform at the moment. Dublin is not a replacement for BizTalk server. You need BizTalk server as a integration solution for LOB applications (f.e. mainframe). Dublin is only about hosting WF and WCF services.
I want to play around with Dublin.
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TechEd 2008,
AzureAs an introduction, James Conard provides us with four demos that use the Azure platform.
The first demo shows a ASP.NET application that will be deployed on the azure .NET Services component of the Azure platform. To deploy the ASP.NET application, there is a special “Azure” deployment project provided in the Azure SDK for Visual Studio 2008. The project builds a package that can be uploaded to the Azure platform. The package exists of a zip file with ASP.NET application bits and a package configuration file. Within the platform the package is deployed on one or more Windows Server Virtual Machines. For what I have seen this is very simple to achieve. It is easy to scale out the application (more instance of the virtual machine is simply a matter of configuration).
In the second demo James retrieves data from the SQL Data Services with a LINQ query through WCF. Programming against the SQL Data Services looks like the same as programming against the ADO.NET Data Services (on-premises)…
In the service bus demo, a on-premises (local) service is consumed by a client through the Service Bus (alias the Internet Service Bus; previous named BizTalk Services). Here we should trust MS to not examine the message send through the service bus. But, this could be resolved by using WS-Security to encrypt the message.
The last demo is about the Live Services. Live Services provide a way to share user’s data between devices.
The keynote was done by Jason Zander. He presented … demonstrated some of the new features in the upcoming release of Visual Studio. He demonstrate those new features around four themes.
First there some features to help us to “understand the code”.
He showed the nice Architecture Explorer tool that helps to find the way through code.
In addition it is possible to add UML sequence diagrams to your project. With that we can explain what is happening in our code… A cool feature here is that the code-editor is able to show the sequence diagram within the code. This is possible because of the editor is rebuild in WPF. You can imagine that VS tool vendors will use this to integrate their tools more within the editor (for example vendors of the refactoring tools).
Another thing is the “including video of testing” and “historical debugging”. Features that might help to find a bug faster. The “lab management” will help to quickly get up an environment for reproduction scenarios.
The second theme was about the web development. VS 2010 the support for ASP.NET MVC and JQuery will help to build ASP.NET applications much faster. The best feature here is the helpers that includes the transform the web.config when deploying the application. The helpers give you the possibility to do configuration for different environments by overriding settings for the different environments (f.e. TEST and PRODUCTION) you will deploy the application in.
There will be new features to build “business office applications” easily. With these features you can build webparts and even debug them. There is a full access to the objects in a sharepoint site.
The last theme was about the “power of C++”. The new C++ product is able to do better incremental builds in large projects. This will speed up the compile time. Jason showed also the support of parallel programming in C++.
So, there is lot of great stuff in the new Visual Studio 2010.
This will be my first time blogging. To start, I write about the interesting things I will see at the TechEd 2008 conference in Barcelona.
After the PDC two weeks ago, the sessions here in Barcelona will cover most of the stuff that was presented at the PDC. I will try not to duplicate what others have blogged already. I will focus on the architecture and SOA sessions. I think those sessions will cover the new “Dublin”, “Oslo” and “Azure” stuff presented on the PDC.