VSLive 2009 in San Francisco

VSLive is a
Microsoft sponsored conference for developers working with Visual Studio and
.Net. The 2009 conference is February
24-26 in San Francisco (with workshop days before and after the sessions). Here are some of the sessions that WCF
developers might be interested in.

Build Distributed
Apps in .NET 3.5 SP1 (pre-conference workshop) by Rockford Lhotka

In this workshop you will learn how to design WPF, Web
Forms, ASP.NET MVC and WCF service applications using a combination of
object-oriented and service-oriented architecture and design principles. This
workshop is about getting things done in .NET, leveraging your knowledge from
.NET 2.0 to build performant, scalable and maintainable applications using the
features of .NET 3.5 SP1. You'll see applications end-to-end, from the database
through the business logic to the presentation layer, and you'll see how
object-oriented techniques increase maintainability, while n-tier client/server
and SOA complement each other to balance performance, scalability and
decoupling of applications.

Managing Data with
Silverlight by Billy Hollis

Silverlight 2.0 is fully data-enabled. Unlike the
media-focused first version, you have many options to get data into and out of
Silverlight 2.0 applications, LINQ capabilities to work with data on the
client, and multiple choices for containing data on the client. This session
will look at ways to get data into Silverlight, including ADO.NET Data Services
and other REST-based services, WCF, and web services, and how each works
end-to-end with data objects on the client to provide a complete and stateful data
experience for the user.

An Introduction to Windows
Communication Foundation by Robert Green

This session will provide an introduction to Windows
Communication Foundation, and answer a number of questions such as: What is
WCF? Why was it invented? How does it compare to Web services or .NET Remoting?
How is it better than those? What is a service? How do I create one? How do I
host one? How do I call one from my applications? What do I need to do to make
sure clients and services can communicate? Once we answer these types of
questions, you will be able to start creating your own WCF services and have a
much better understanding of how to work with this promising new technology.

Code Name "Dublin":
Windows Application Server by Aaron Skonnard

Microsoft recently announced a set of enhanced Windows
Server capabilities code named "Dublin" that offer greater
scalability and easier manageability around WCF/WF applications. Dublin extends
IIS/WAS to provide a standard host environment for applications that use these
core .NET technologies to simplify the deployment, configuration, management,
and scalability of composite applications, while allowing developers to use
their existing skills with Visual Studio, .NET, and IIS. This session introduces
you to the new world of Dublin.

What's New in WCF/WF
4.0 by Aaron Skonnard

.NET 4.0 brings several improvements in the areas of WCF and
WF, including improved REST capabilities, a new workflow model, seamless
integration between WF and WCF, and a new visual designer. It also provides the
ability to author completely declarative (XAML-based) Workflow services that
can be more easily deployed, hosted, and managed. This session walks you
through the various new 4.0 features and shows you how to write code using them
today.

Understanding
Transactions in WCF by Robert Boedigheimer

Transactions play an important role in keeping our systems
in a consistent state, making sure that combined operations all succeed or all
fail. When working with (web) services, transactions are more complex than
within a single AppDomain. Fortunately, we have transactions support in WCF to
help us manage this complexity. This session looks at how transactions work in
WCF, the different transaction managers used by WCF in different scenarios, and
of course how to use transactions in WCF.

Web 2.0 + WCF by Aaron
Skonnard

WCF provides first-class support for building
"Web" services that embrace REST design principles using standard Web
protocols and data formats. This session illustrates how to build WCF services
that support the HTTP uniform interface and different resource representations
like XML, JSON, and Atom/AtomPub to enhance your Web 2.0 mash-ups. We'll
specifically look at the new features in WCF, the WCF REST Starter Kit and
ADO.NET Data Services.

Building RESTful
Services using Windows Communication Foundation by Jon Flanders

REST is an architectural style for building services. It has
been popular outside of the Microsoft development community for many years, and
is quickly becoming the de facto standard inside as well. Microsoft has enabled
this style of services with a new programming model and runtime enhancements in
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 3.5. This programming model enables
developers to build services using a RESTful architecture. This session covers
the basics of REST, how to build this type of service using WCF 3.5, and other
features (such as AJAX/JSON, Feeds, and ADO.NET Data Services) that this web
programming model enables.

Supporting POX/REST
with WCF by Michiel van Otegem

For web services WCF uses SOAP by default and although this
is a good thing for some scenarios, there are a lot of scenarios where this is
overkill and POX/REST is good enough. Also, some services or clients don't
support SOAP, for instance because they were built before SOAP became
widespread. This session looks at
supporting POX/REST messaging and how to support it side-by-side with other
protocols. Topics discussed include message processing, message signing, session
management and WCF REST Starter Kit.

Mashing-up WCF and WF
by Miguel Castro

.NET 3.0 introduced us to W*F technologies. (Hey, did we
just coin a new term there?) While many jumped on the WCF bandwagon and others
on the WF one, some people tried to jam the two of them together, only to find
that it was a bit cumbersome and lacking in elegance (and don't get us started
on the difficulty of the web service activities).. Enter .NET 3.5. Two new
Workflow activities have been added to the mix that are specifically designed
to marry the worlds of Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication
Foundation. Before you stay up all night trying to figure out exactly how these
things work, come join this session. You'll get an end-to-end explanation of
what these two new activities are and how they work.