Webcast/Labcast series on WCF, WF and CardSpace
For the past few weeks (including this week) I've been presenting some introductory webcasts on the core technologies of .NET 3.0 - namely Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows CardSpace.
The spin on these particular webcasts is that in addition to the slides setting up the core concepts, they all derive their demonstrations from several Virtual Labs that are available. This particular set of labs can be found at https://www.microsoftvirtuallabs.com/VirtualTraining/no070618/ondemand.aspx. Virtual labs are great because you can login remotely to a machine that's ready to go, download the manuals, watch videos of the exercises, and even branch out on your own and explore stuff. These labs are a nice holistic view of many Microsoft technologies working together. The scenario is "Dinner Now", which represents a fictional website that front-ends many (also fictional) restaurants, allowing customer to order food from multiple restaurants in one order. DinnerNow then forwards the orders to the client app running at the restaurants, who then would cook the food and notify a delivery driver (using a Windows Mobile device) that an order is ready for pickup. Along the way you see many things from my webcasts in action, along with AJAX, WPF, .NET Compact Framework, and more.
The labs are running on Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn) but most of what we are showing is in .NET 3.0 so it's part of Vista and can be downloaded for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.
Here are the webcasts I've delivered (you can watch the recordings or sign up for the 3rd one this week).