The beta 1 release of the next version of .NET Framework and Visual Studio to MSDN and to the public has received a lot of attention. Now you want to get started right? So let’s look at what is new for developers. Well a great starting point would be the training kit for Windows Communication Foundation and Workflow Foundation by DPE. 

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wcfwf4/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2698

At the moment the kit contains six labs, including code snippets, to try the latest features amongst which: service discovery!

Introduction to Workflow 4

In this lab you will get to know the basics of creating, hosting and running a workflow. This lab is also intended to be an introduction to the new workflow authoring constructs in the .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010, including the new Workflow Designer, expressions, variables and arguments. Additionally, you will explore the use of some basic built-in activities.

Introduction to Workflow Services using .NET Framework 4

This hands-on lab is intended to introduce developers to writing workflow services using .NET Framework 4. You will examine the different messaging activities of Windows Workflow, and learn how to configure them to create a distributed application. This lab is built around a specific HR business scenario where candidates submit their applications and are hired or rejected based on an evaluation process.

Workflow Designer Programming Model

This hands-on lab introduces you to the designer programming model of Windows Workflow 4. You will learn how to rehost the workflow designer in a WPF desktop application and how to create composite custom designers for your workflow activities.

Creating Flowchart Workflows

This lab is intended to be an introduction to the Flowchart paradigm used in Workflow development. In this lab you will learn how to create Flowchart Workflows using the designer, and you will also learn the usage of several of the provided activities and how to create custom activities easily.

Monitoring Workflow Services using .NET Framework 4

During the life cycle of an application, developers and system administrators often need to monitor running services in order to perform health checks or troubleshoot issues. The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) runtimes already come with a built-in tracking infrastructure, making it easy to enable monitoring within your WCF and WF applications. In this hands-on lab you will learn how you can leverage some of the main WF and WCF monitoring features to track application execution and troubleshoot problems with services when necessary.

WCF Service Discovery using .NET Framework 4

Windows Communication Foundation 4 includes a new feature that enables service discovery. Service discovery allows you to locate services on the same subnet using ad hoc discovery, or using a proxy to establish connections with servers regardless of where they are. In this lab you will create a simple chat application that will use both methods to learn about available services.

As usual Microsoft are looking for feedback. If you would like to comment on the hands-on labs, send your thoughts to wfwcfhol@microsoft.com.

And you can also find samples for WCF and WF which have been updated to run on Beta 1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=5aca0622-d87d-4cc9-a22c-0d58205a56b4

Here it is! Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1 as well as .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 have been released to the public. Soma made the announcement of the release to MSDN on Monday, but now all the goods are available to everyone too.

We have been involved in the Technical Adoption Program since early 2008 and it has been a great ride. Lots of good information has been tried and shared and earlier this year the TAP partners presented on VSTS 2010 during the APO Conference.

The VSTS installation experience is pretty straightforward: When you start the setup, select to install VSTS 2010.

Click next.

Accept the license agreement.

Select the .NET Development Environment.

Optionally click the Customize button to select components to install.

Click Next to start the installation.

The setup prompts to restart your machine after the .NET Frameworks have been installed. And so it does again after the installation is complete.

And then your favorite development environment is ready to be used! Select your environment settings.

The new start page.

And the new layout for project and file types.

Oh, and I am sure you noticed the new user interface in Windows Presentation Foundation.

Except for the startup performance I love every bit of it.

Now we are looking forward to using VSTS and TFS in a managed production environment.

This looks like something that will really boost Silverlight adoption in the enterprise. As you may know I like functional software: good looking websites are great but I want them to actually do something. Until now it was pretty hard to create business websites in Silverlight, which was primarily created to provide a great user experience.

Enter .NET Rich Internet Application Services: designed for business applications, to show, query and validate data and manage cross-cutting concerns such as security.

Now you may find this screenshot a bit boring. But I actually like it: this is stuff we can use at projects. The experimental phase has passed and we can now do more than render fancy controls and animations…

To start using .NET RIA Services you need the following software:

• Microsoft Silverlight 3 Developer Runtime
• Microsoft Silverlight 3 Beta SDK
• Microsoft Silverlight 3 Tools for VS2008SP1

Obviously you will also have to get the RIA Services installer and there also is a 116-page overview document available at that location.

After you install the RIA Services, new items appear in your start menu: A walkthrough, API documentation and a link to that same overview document.

The API documentation shows new namespaces available in RIA Services:

• System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations
• System.Web.DomainServices
• System.Web.DomainServices.LinqToEntities
• System.Web.DomainServices.LinqToSql
• System.Web.DomainServices.Tools
• System.Web.Ria
• System.Web.Ria.ApplicationServices
• System.Web.Ria.Data
• System.Windows.Controls
• System.Windows.Data
• System.Windows.Ria.ApplicationServices
• System.Windows.Ria.Data

If you are really interested, check out these presentations at MIX:

Building Amazing Business Centric Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3

Code and a running app are available here.

Building Data-Driven Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft ASP.NET

While VS2010 Beta1 is still a few weeks out and we are using the CTP, the buzz is starting: New features of VSTS2010 are great steps for ALM and VS2010 will bring .NET 4.0 and parallel computing.

Today I saw the first publicly available screenshots of Visual Studio 2010 that show a new user interface based on Windows Presentation Foundation. At the VSX Dev Con Rico Mariano spoke about a good-looking Visual Studio, but no graphics were shown then. Below you can see the effects of WPF and I think it looks great.

This is also good for WPF applications, as this shows that WPF is ready for large systems in the enterprise.

Read more about today's announcement here.

On March 13 there is an Application Platform Optimization conference in the Netherlands. Clemens, Marcel and I will talk about Visual Studio Team System 2010 in the development track on testing, architecture and work item tracking respectively. The other tracks are data management/business intelligence and SOA/business process. The conference day before will be focused on the same topics but is intended for managers and technical decision makers. Even though the agenda is not complete yet, it looks to be a promising event with presentations by:

• Kevin Ashby - Enterprise Platform Modernization, Microsoft
• Ofer Ashkenazi - Sr. Technical Product Manager, Microsoft
• Sam Guckenheimer - Group Product Planner Visual Studio Team System, Microsoft

New versions of my favorite products are being released later this year: BizTalk 2009 and Visual Studio Team System 2010. Obviously I am very excited to see interesting Microsoft speakers make it to the conference. If you can not wait to learn more about Visual Studio Team System 2010 below are a few links where you can get to know the product a little more:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Visual-Studio-Team-System-2010-Week-on-Channel-9/ 
http://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio/
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/

Later next month I am presenting at Software Developer Network event. That talk will be on the Application Architecture Guide 2.0 which I discussed in a recent post.

Recently Microsoft Patterns & Practices released an updated version of the Application Architecture Guide. This guide is an invaluable source of information for anyone creating .NET applications. If you are looking for ways to structure your application, for challenges of specific application types or for non-functional requirements, you should read this document. Below is a fragment of the introduction: 

“The purpose of the Application Architecture Guide 2.0 is to improve your effectiveness when building applications on the Microsoft platform. The primary audience for this guide is solution architects and development leads. The guide provides design-level guidance for the architecture and design of applications built on the Microsoft .NET platform. It focuses on the most common types of applications and on partitioning application functionality into layers, components, and services, and also walks through their key design characteristics.”

The document consists of 387 pages, which may seem big. If there is just one thing you should take away from the guide, I would say it is the following diagram. It is the reference architecture of a general application that has layers for presentation, services, business and data logic. It also connects to data sources and other services and has cross-cutting concerns like security and operations.

Immediately after the guide appeared Clemens wrote a great post about AppArch guide 2.0 and Visual Studio 2010. Since I realized that most are now working in Visual Studio 2008, I thought I would create some visuals in the current technology. So to start I created a new solution and added an Application Diagram that would contain all elements. Normally when designing top-down you create a conceptual design, which you can also do by adding a System Diagram as the conceptual design and for each of the elements on your conceptual design add other System Diagrams. The below image is what you end up with: A diagram in Visual Studio that contains all your layers of the above reference architecture.

In each of the system diagrams that represent the layers you can now add components from the reference architecture. For instance add service interfaces and message types to the services layer. For the presentation it could look like this.

Normally you can not add Class Libraries to diagrams. To be able to use the red shape, you can use power tools for VSTS Architecture Edition, which were developed for Beta2 but they work fine in Visual Studio 2008 RTM and SP1.

When you are done your application diagram will look similar to this. I think this approach is great to create levels of abstraction: The diagram containing the layers describes how you separate layers and the application diagram shows the actual projects.

When you right-click on the application diagram you can select “implement all applications”, which will generate projects and references for all items in the diagram. Your solution is now almost done. The one thing missing compared to the reference architecture is the cross-cutting concerns, for which you can use Enterprise Library. Enterprise Library is a great framework that takes care of plumbing for caching, data access, etc.  Just add EntLib, or your preferred framework, to your solution and you are ready to go. Remember, if you have any questions, check out the AppArch guide and the knowledge base.

If you are developing on an x64 machine, you may receive an error when installing Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1:

After opening the log you see this detailed message: “VC_IA64Runtime.exe - Exe installer's log file/hint (%temp%\dd_VC_IA64Runtime*.txt|%temp%\..\dd_VC_IA64Runtime*.txt) does not exist or is invalid”.

The solution for me was to uninstall the Remote Debugger from Add/Remove Programs and then install Service Pack 1.

For additional information on getting remote debugging back to work, see this article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y7f5zaaa.aspx 

The long story was that:

• I started applying this recent download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=98e83614-c30a-4b75-9e05-0a9c3fbdd20d. Each of the three downloads was followed by a reboot. No luck.
• I tried downloading the Service Pack again and also tried the EXE installer.
• I tried copying the contents of the ISO to the harddisk when I saw an error stating that the installer tried to create a folder on the source drive. Obviously this does not work since the source drive is a read-only mounted ISO just as a DVD would be.
• I tried applying the C++ runtime separately as the above error message is related to that.
• I tried uninstalling the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 components that I installed while they were in Community Technology Preview, amongst which ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions.
• Also the Patch Removal Tool failed, pointing to an issue with the Remote Debugger: “CleanupBlock (UnAdvertiseFeatures) failed on product (Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger - ENU).”

Microsoft Surface is touch technology implemented in hardware such as a desk or a table. This sounds great for techies as we saw at PDC, where thousands of attendees all wanted to get their hands on the surface devices placed throughout the conference building. More and more it gets interesting in retail and finance industries too. Steve Clayton recently blogged about how BMW and Barclays Bank use it.

Here is a new video that shows a practical application of Surface in which you really see great graphics come to live. 

See the YouTube video

Last week I presented at an internal event and at the SDN Event. Both presentations were on Live Mesh.

I have been a fan since I saw a video on Channel 9. It showed synchronization that made me think of Groove, where Live Mesh has a programmable object model. Little did we know about Live Mesh being a part of the Windows Azure framework. So when I went to the Professional Developer Conference in October, I was very anxious to see Live Mesh sessions.

Ori Amiga the PM of Live Mesh did some great sessions. He also created a few movies on Channel 9, one of which is awesome showing his car that is part of the mesh.

In short Windows Azure is Microsoft's operating system for the cloud on which there is functionality for developing applications in .NET that store data in a database. .NET Services consist of Access Control, service bus and workflow. SQL Services have functionality for relational data and other BI functionality is coming. Third there are Live Services, providing familiar services that you've known from the upgraded Windows Live family such as Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Search, Earth, etc.

Live Mesh is a great sample application that demonstrates the use of services and storage in the cloud and also provides great consumer functionality. You start by installing the client on your PC and that automatically adds the device to your mesh. There also is an installer for Windows Mobile, that adds limited Mesh functionality to your device.

OK, so you have installed the client on your devices. Now you can explore your Mesh both online and through the client. They both show shared folders, your devices and news that informs about file and user changes. You can invite other users to share those files. The folders are not only synchronized over your devices, but also in the cloud. By default you get 5GB of storage. The good thing about your files in the cloud is that it is stored outside of your devices, and also that you can access your files in your online desktop.

Enough text for now, just have a look and try it. If you want to create applications that take advantage of your Live Mesh, you can get access to the Live Mesh for developers.

Last month was the SAF2008 in San Francisco, CA. They have had some impressive speakers (Simon Guest, Jack Greenfield, ...) and topics (Delivering Architectural Guidance, Growing Architect Communities, ...).

What strikes me most is the focus on the cloud platform in a very business functional way. The presentation on Multi-Enterprise Business Applications is a great example of that, where you see a story you realize straight-away and just a few slides later you see where the internet service bus comes in. The good thing the MEBA sessions also notices is that ISB is just in its early stages. There are services to be added to create manageable and trustable processes in the cloud, which are described as "Higher Level Services" taking care of

• Party Management
• Service Choreography
• Business Process
• Community Management

Great stuff that gets me thinking...

The slides are available on the new Architect Center. http://architect-center.com/groups/saf/media/default.aspx

Last year's content seems to be still available (including recordings) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb267380.aspx