PerfectTheft.

PerfectXml.com has a redirect tool up that presents this blog (and everyone else's blog) on their site: http://www.perfectxml.com/RSSConnect/RR.asp?u=http://radio.weblogs.com/0108971/rss.xml. Since they didn't get back on my email, I'll have to tell them in public:

Any content of this blog is my property. The RSS feed is available for aggregation and personal information by anyone, BUT if you republish my weblog on your website without my permission, you are stealing intellectual property and you are violating my copyright.  Take that redirector down or block my blog.

Thank you, Julia. I am glad you liked my TechEd sessions and thank you for the kind words :)  However ...

What is so strange is that I cannot get  used to seeing him open up and work in Visual Studio. Why on earth is that? Perhaps it is something to do with the level of what he is talking about that it is bigger than coding, so though he obviously needs to code to put the concepts in action, it just seems almost mundane in comparison to the concepts.

Hmmm .... I am not sure whether I agree here. Most of the things that I talked about were really about code all the way and then I can just as well show some (or flood the audience with codce as in WEB404). The takeaway are the concepts. My job is to bring lesser known things into the limelight. In that I do agree.

TechEd / DEV359, WEB404 related code

Earlier builds and some explanation of the stuff that I have been showing in the talks can be found here (Enterprise Services AOP) and there (Web Services Extensibility). These builds are for Visual Studio .NET 2002. The builds for the new version will -- as said -- be available some time next week. Don't complain... it's free stuff, after all ;)

TechEd / Getting stuff out the door: Code for DEV357

Pending a more polished and documented version (which I'll publish some time next week), here's "just" the zipped up directory with the code from the DEV357 session (Building distributed apps). 41 C# files, 375KB of source code. Way too much ;)

The code for DEV359 and WEB404 is a bit more difficult to pack up, because it's much harder to deploy and get to work without a proper installer. Unfortunately all WMI support for the Framework died on this machine this week ("Provider load failure") and is fubar and therefore I can't test the installation procedures to put stuff into machine.config. So that may have to wait until next week :(

Demos, demos, demos

I should probably stop writing more stuff for my Thursday demos. I think that some 10000 lines of "giveaway" source code should be enough ... but somehow I feel like I am still not done yet. Here's a quick list of the stuff that I have with me to show.

• Aspect oriented programming with Remoting and Enterprise Services and Web Services using the same extensibility model
• An attribute driven validator for object-graphs of structures and classes of arbitrary depth (sort of like schema validation for XML, but on objects)
• Schema facets (maxLength, minLength, pattern, etc.) generated into the WSDL from [WebMethod] parameters and data structures
• Just in Time Activation pooling as a the ultimate performance booster for Enterprise Services
• A multi-tier "cascade" for data services for that can serve up read-only data from cache (memory) or isolated storage or a remote web service or straight from a SQL store through the flip of a config file entry and which are connected in a way that the isolated storage refreshed through the web service which then walks up to SQL.

What I will show in which detail largely depends on how the talks go in terms of timing. Since my DEV357, DEV359 and WEB404 talks are all back-to-back-to-back (different rooms, though), I will essentially be using one larger demo for all of them (and I am still putting it together right now .. cough!). In DEV357, I'll primarily talk about the relationship between ASMX Web Services and Enterprise Services and how to use ES efficiently as a backend for ASMX. In DEV359 I'll drill down into the "aspectish" elements of the demo application and talk about separation of primary concerns ("why you write the app") and secondary concerns ("stuff that needs to be done, too"). In WEB404 I will show how I teach "Add Web Reference" to generate code that has references to stuff in "newtelligence.Web.Services" in it and how I can make the schema in ASMX's generated WSDL a bit better.

I will try to post links to as much of the actual source code for the demos and its support libraries here until the end of the week. Don't expect anything before Thursday, though. Right now I am writing installers, because I don't want to make it unneccessarily hard for all of you to try the stuff at home.

TechEd: Meet Juval Löwy and me at the INETA booth

Juval Löwy and myself will be at the INETA booth (Aisle 600) in the expo area at TechEd today between Noon and 1:30pm and between 3:15pm and 5:00pm. So, if you have any questions about Enterprise Services or Web Services just come over and I am sure that Juval will have an appropriate answer for you ;)

"Power Lunch with Don Box and Friends"

As said before, I got invited to a fun lunch panel discussion with Don, Yasser Shohoud, and Steve Swartz. We chatted about 45 minutes about things we all like and dislike about the .NET Framework as it ships today, about XML and SOAP standards, how to build Web Services "right" in .NET, about the unfortunate split between infrastructures for Remoting, Enterprise Services and ASMX and plenty other little things.

Quote of the day:

• Don: "So, Steve, is COM dead?"
• Steve: "There's a time when you are growing up and everything is exciting at the time. There's always new things, new stuff to look at, it's all cool. And then at some point you're grown up and it's not that you die when you're a grownup, right? So, COM is a grownup now. It just lives." 

Ping! .... from TechEd 2003 Dallas

I haven't been blogging for more than  two weeks now because of (a) being very busy on the road and (b) being sick all last week. After 8 or so weeks on the road, my body just went on strike and punished me for all the stress in many horrible ways.

Anyways, I am back online now, sitting in the speaker's lounge at TechEd Dallas checking some email, working on the samples for Thursday (details on that later) and just got invited by Don to participate in the "Web Services Roundtable: Power Lunch with Don Box and Friends" session that's at 12:15pm in the Arena. I don't know what's on the agenda, but Don said I should just come up. I am sure it's going to be fun.

Still on the road.

Friday was my first scheduled office day after 2 1/2 months on the road. Now I am sitting in the CSA airport lounge in Prague (free Internet, bring cable) waiting for my flight to Bucharest. Tuesday I go to Frankfurt, then on to our TornadoCamp.NET event in Bad Ems (Germany) where I'll be for the rest of the week. As per current planning, I'll have a couple of days at home next week and then I am going to Dallas, TX for TechEd. The U.S. is country #18 on this year's list -- no, wait, been there already this year.

For TechEd I am prepping a set of new extensions for ASMX. I think ASMX doesn't do as well in regards to its support for XML Schema as it could.

My talks at Microsoft TechEd in Dallas will be:

WEB404: ASP.NET Web Services Extensibility: "I didn't know you could do that!"
DEV359: Aspect Oriented Programming
DEV357: Building Distributed .NET Applications

The last one (which is likely going to be rescheduled to earlier in the week than Thursday) is the most important and ambitious one. I will try to give some guidance around the "appropriate use" of .NET Remoting, Enterprise Services and Web Services and show that there that there's no "vs." or "or" between those three technologies but an "and". I'll talk about layers and tiers, process models, security, data, objects, services -- all in a bit more than an hour.

A 3-day workshop based on the Microsoft EMEA Building Scalable Applications Tour 2003.  The first day is direct from the tour and days 2 and 3 are putting it all into practice in a hands-on workshop! Send mail to info@newtelligence.com for details.

Maximum travel -- This past week

This week was a crazy travel week and I can't wait to be back home tonight. It's a miracle that I still have my bag and didn't miss any connections and everything worked out. Here's a brief summary of the travel ordeal:

• Sunday afternoon: Drove from Meerbusch (Düsseldorf) to Frankfurt (2 hrs) for the first stop on the German roadshow with Jörg. Jörg took my car from there to Munich for another event.
• Monday: Frankfurt event, went to the aiport in the afternoon to catch a flight to Oslo for the Norwegian Developer Days.
• Tuesday: Oslo event, then to the airport to catch a 1845 flight to Frankfurt, got into Frankfurt with a 30 minute delay into the "B" gates, with my connection to Venice already boarding for 10 minutes in the "A" gates. Frankfurt is big. Ran from "B" to "A" an got to the gate just before they were closing the doors. Of course, the Venice flight ended up being in line for takeoff about 30 minutes. Got into Venice late (and miraculously still got my bag) and made it to the rental car booth about 5 minutes before the lady there would have closed shop. Got a car and drove to Trieste and then on to Portoroz in Slovenia. Got into the hotel at 0200.
• Wednesday: Slovenian event
• Thursday: Got up at 0500, got into the car at 0530 and drove back to Trieste airport (which isn't called Trieste Airport). Caught an 0820 plane to Munich, got there at 0930, got into a cab and was at the event location for the Munich stop of the German launch 20 minutes before my talk was due to start. At 1815 got into a cab to the aiport, boarded at 1950 for a flight to Berlin. Arrived at the hotel at around 2200
• Friday: Berlin event, tonight at around 2000 going home to Düsseldorf. I'll be using the 19th and last flight coupon of the ticket that I had on me in the last three weeks, Scalable Applications Tour included. Next week: next ticket.

That much on "all this travel must be great fun". Being at events and talking to developers and architects is great fun, the travel part isn't, really.

Enterprise Services Beispiel von der deutschen VS.NET/Server Roadshow 2003
Enterprise Services Sample from the Slovenian NT Konferenca 2003, Norway Developer Days

Dieses Archiv beinhaltet das in meinem Enterprise Services Vortrag gezeigte Beispiel zu JustInTimeActivation und Pooling von der deutschen VS.NET/Windows Server 2003 Roadshow.

This sample around JustInTimeActivation and Pooling has also been shown at the DevDays in Norway last Tuesday and the NTKonferenca in Portoroz on Wednesday and is a slight variation of the DataSet caching example that I posted earlier.

Sample code from Norway

Here's the zipped up sample code that I've been showing during my Metadata talk at the VS.NET launch event in Oslo. It's demonstrating yet another use of the constraint attributes that I've written quite a while ago. The idea is simple. When you use restriction facets on types defined in XSD and map them into a programming model, most of the facets get crippled away. They get totally lost when XSD.EXE generates classes and only length constraints survive DataSet code generation. Now, if you use the code in this archive, you can retrofit your classes with the appropriate facets like this:

 [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlTypeAttribute(
    Namespace="urn:schemas-newtelligence-com:
    transactionsamples:customerdata:v1")]
 public class customerType 
 {
  [Match(@"\p{L}[\p{L}\p{P}0-9\s]+"),MaxLength(80)]
  public string FirstName;
        
  [Match(@"\p{L}[\p{L}\p{P}0-9\s]+"),MaxLength(80)]
  public string LastName;
        
  [Match(@"[0-9\+][0-9\-\(\)\s]*"),MaxLength(26)]
  public string HomePhone;
        
  [Match(@"[0-9\+][0-9\-\(\)\s]*"),MaxLength(26)]
  public string BusinessPhone;
        
  [Match(@"[0-9\+][0-9\-\(\)\s]*"),MaxLength(26)]
  public string MobilePhone;
 }

.. and then you simply run an entire object graph through the validation function provided by the ConstraintValidator class like this:

ConstraintValidator cv = new ConstraintValidator();
cv.Validate( customers );

If validation fails, you get an exception with a detailed description of the problem. The net result is that all validation happens on the object graph and not using a serialization step and a run through the XmlValidatingReader. That saves time and allows you to keep promises in regards to XSD based message contracts even if your data will never be serialized into angle brackets. XSD rocks. Consider queued components. Voilá.

Update: I got an email comment detailing an (obviously pretty stupid) bug that I have in the validation function. I'll take a look at it and will post an update shortly. Fixed.

Norwegian Visual Studio .NET 2003 launch event

I am on Norway today and I am sitting here blogging between two talks. "Say what you will say and listen to what you will listen to" was the first and now it's about Enterprise Services. It's going to take a day or two to wrap up the samples.