WCF at TechEd 2009

TechEd 2009 is just a few weeks away now May 11th through 15th in Los Angeles. Here's what's on tap at the conference covering WCF.

SOA201 A First Look at WCF and WF in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 by Aaron Skonnard

Programs coordinate work. The code for coordination and state management often obscures the purpose of a program. Learn how programming with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4 provides clarity of intent while preserving the functional richness of the .NET Framework. See how easy it is to build workflows with the new Microsoft Visual Studio workflow designer. Learn about text-based authoring options for WF. Hear how WF integrates well with other Microsoft technologies (WCF, WPF, ASP.NET). If you've looked at WF before, come and see the changes to data flow, composition, and new control flow styles. Significant improvements to usability, composability, and performance make Workflow a great fit for a broad range of solutions on both the client and the server.

SOA204 The Microsoft Developer Platform for Building Software-Plus-Services Applications by Burley Kawasaki and Anush Kumar

Are you an IT manager looking for an overview of the key advances in the Microsoft .NET Framework, and how they can help drive significant improvements in code quality and productivity for your development teams? Are you being asked to do more with less resources while the complexity of business solutions you need increases and spans into the cloud? Come to this session to see Microsoft's developer platform in action and understand our roadmap for .NET. Learn about Microsoft's vision for enabling greater productivity and agility, by enabling developers to build their current and future applications on a consistent set of skills, frameworks, and platform capabilities.

SOA206 Every Class As a Service: WCF As the New Microsoft .NET by Juval Lowy

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is more than just the next generation platform for building connected systems. In many respects, WCF is the next development platform for Windows applications, providing system features that are presently crafted by hand on top of .NET and Windows. With WCF, every class automatically benefits from security, instrumentation, call timeout, error masking, fault isolation, reliability, remote calls, tracing and logging, calls buffering, synchronization, interoperability, and with little or no change could also benefit from queued calls, transactions management, and various instantiation modes. To maximize the use of these off-the-shelf plumbing aspects you should push the service boundary down into your system, but taken to its ultimate conclusion--should every class be a WCF services? And what about performance? This session starts with discussing the power and productivity of WCF as a 'Better .NET', contrasting WCF used granularly on every class with classic .NET in terms of performance, throughput and scalability, and substantiate the provocative claim that every class can and should be a service.

SOA302 Building RESTful Services Using WCF 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 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. In this session we cover the basics of REST, how to build this type of service using WCF 3.5, and about the other features (such as AJAX/JSON, Feeds, and ADO.NET Data Services) that this Web programming model enables.

SOA303 Busy Microsoft .NET Developer's Guide to WCF, SOA, and Success by Ted Neward

Working with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), particularly when trying to interoperate against technologies that aren't .NET-based (such as the various Java stacks or Ruby), can be a frustrating and mystifying experience. In this presentation, we talk about how to make WCF work successfully, without a lot of hype, clouds, or hand-waving, including how to get WCF to talk to a RESTful endpoint, a SOAP endpoint, and how to test your WCF code to make sure it's sending what you think it should.

SOA309 Load Balancing and Scaling Your WCF Services Today and Tomorrow by Michèle Leroux Bustamante

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a platform for distributed system development and SOA. Large-scale production systems are typically deployed in redundant environments with multiple Web servers, application servers, and database servers. System administrators typically configure appliance or software load balancers to handle distribution of load among each tier-and this requires WCF architects and developers to be aware of the potential implications of their service configurations. This session focuses on the affects of transport and application sessions; overhead related to channel creation and the benefits of shared proxies and multithreading; the implications of shared proxies on load balancing; and appropriate deployment configurations to support this distributed scenario. We also discuss the impact of the forthcoming Microsoft .NET Framework 4 release and the Windows Application Server ("Dublin") on these scenarios to help you plan for future migration.

SOA313 StockTrader Sample Application Case Study: Performance and Java Interop by Gregory Leake

This session focuses on .NET and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) performance and scalability for services built with Windows Communication Foundation. The session includes information comparing/contrasting the performance of various different WCF bindings/encoding standards and security standards with actual benchmark results. Information on performance trade-offs, tuning for performance and performing your own load tests are covered. In addition, the session discusses interoperability between .NET 3.5-based services and non-Microsoft platforms, both Java Enterprise and OSS-based. Comparative benchmark data are presented and discussed with respect to WCF/business logic vs. equivalent workloads on Java Enterprise. The session also offers an overview for implementing load balancing and failover for WCF services.

SIA312 Introduction to Claims-Based Programming and the Microsoft Code Name "Geneva" Framework by Keith Brown

For years, Windows has supported a rich, built-in authentication and authorization framework. If you can assume clients will have a Windows account, you can rely on Windows integrated authentication to validate client identity, and use impersonation, ACLs, and role-based security to authorize access to resources. But that model only works if all of your users have Active Directory accounts in a trusted domain. It's difficult to turn one of these applications to face the Internet to support remote employees, partners, and so on. This talk introduces you to a new model for identity, which allows you to factor authentication and many authorization decisions out of your applications and into a central identity service. This model makes it much easier to achieve Internet-friendly single sign-on. It also makes it easier for your application to receive richer identity information, and paves the way for identity federation, should you ever need to integrate with another organization or another platform (Java, for example). This talk introduces the Microsoft code name "Geneva" Framework as the new API for building claims-aware applications.

DTL324 Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Overview for the Business Application Developer by Jay Schmelzer

Visual Studio 2010 includes a number of exciting advancements for all developers building on the Microsoft platform(s). In this demo-focused session we focus on the advancements specifically targeted at developers building line-of-business applications targeting the Windows, Web, and Microsoft Office system platforms. We take a practical look at the tools for working with data via the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and Windows Communication Foundation, creating desktop applications using Windows Presentation Foundation, Web applications using Microsoft ASP.NET, the ASP.NET Dynamic Data Controls and Microsoft Silverlight and Office Business Applications that include Office client customizations in Excel, Word, and Outlook and SharePoint Server applications all from within Microsoft Visual Studio. If you build business applications this is the session for you.

OFC307 Integrating WPF and WCF into Your Office Business Applications by Tim Huckaby

This session highlights many of the ways that the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) can be leveraged in Office applications built with Visual Studio Tools for the Office System (VSTO). Visual Studio 2008 introduced an array of new features aimed at a wide range of Office solution types. With Visual Studio 2008, you can build solutions that incorporate the native capabilities of the Office client applications (like Outlook) combined with the sophisticated UI capabilities of WPF that's connected to remote data and services via WCF and use the RAD features of LINQ to manipulate that data. These new technologies provide opportunities for building powerful solutions with functionality that was previously difficult or impossible to achieve. Now that Office has evolved into a true development platform, office-based solutions are becoming increasingly sophisticated, less document-focused, and more loosely coupled. This session shows you how easy it is to build robust solutions that leverage the latest technologies.

OFC327 Developing and Consuming Services for Microsoft SharePoint by Steve Fox

We are increasingly living in a services-oriented world, and increasingly developers are wanting to integrate services of all kinds with SharePoint. This session provides an overview of how you can build and deploy custom services with SharePoint, specifically focusing on the development of ASP.NET and Windows Communication Foundation services for SharePoint and the consumption of these services from client applications including Microsoft Silverlight controls.