Community Launch: Windows Server, Visual Studio & SQL Server 2008
Four Malaysian technical communities, Intel IT Technical Community Malaysia Chapter .NET SIG, ELITE, MIND and SPAN, are coming together to host a community event focusing on technical dives of Microsoft Windows Server 2008â„¢, Visual Studio 2008â„¢, and SQL Server 2008â„¢.
Date : 28 June 2008, Saturday
Venue : Microsoft Auditorium
Microsoft (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd
Level 29, Tower 2,
Petronas Twin Tower, KL
Website : http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/events/communityheroes/
Find out about Microsoft’s future direction here
To be precise it’s at PDC 2008 where Microsoft use it to showcase future technologies that is years away. I remember first reading about .NET 1.0 at PDC years ago. Even though USD keep on shrinking in value, it is still quite costly for a poor little developer like me to folk out USD2000++ for the event. That is not yet including air ticket and hotel stay.
But nevertheless, one can guess what is in store for the future by just looking at the agenda. Below are some that caught my attention
1. There will be tonnes of enhancement made so that developers find it easy to develop service oriented application in the cloud. WCF and WF will be the main building block here where you should look out for sessions like Advanced Workflow Services, A Lap Around Building Block Services, Architecture of the Building Block Services.
2. .NET is coming to Windows Server Core, check out “Developing with .Net and ASP.NET for Server Core”. Maybe not the full .NET Framework but its worth to know that I can have clusters of Server Cores running ASP.NET or SharePoint.
3. Mesh will materialize with so many sessions talking about it. My colleagues call it Groove on steriod, but lets see what are in store in PDC later. I am still waiting for my beta account here.
4. OBA is still alive with the next version of Visual Studio continue to add features to it especially to the deployment part. I complained about VSTO click once deployment features not on par with Windows Form click once so definitely something will be seen on this area. But unfortunately don’t see any mention of Office 14 here.
5. Silverlight going to target LOB application developers and maybe there will be a repeater control like the one found in ASP.NET. All this while I feel SL is more suitable for customer facing apps like catalog and e-commerce store. Interop experience between COM and .NET will be enhanced.
6. ADO.NET and COM will be around for long time and there is a mention of ADO.NET v3.0 despite LINQ took a lot of limelight in .NET 3.5 release. Also for native C++ programmers, you guys can at last do WS-* web service development easily with new API and framework.
7. Windows 7! Windows 7! Windows 7! Graphics, touch UI and energy could the on brain of next generation OS developers.
Again here is the website of PDC 2008 http://www.microsoftpdc.com
Bank using WPF on ATM
Tim Heuer blogged about Wells Fargo adoption of WPF into their ATM user interface. For any technology, having a financial institution to adopt it in a customers facing application is really a vote of confidence that it is ready for critical mass.
With banks automating more of their businesses and putting them onto ATM and Internet banking, user experience is getting more crucial because of the dozens of services they offer, the screen property is limited. Old style ATM UI consist of just text is not usable to get customers to the service they looking for. WPF fits nicely here because of the deep integration with a strong application development platform like .NET and there is a good workflow synergy between the developers and designers to help boost productivity.
I just hope my local banks in Malaysia will realize this also and start putting investment into user experience around ATMs and Internet Banking.
Workflow Foundation and LINQ2SQL: Of BinaryFormatter and DataContractSerializer
There seem to be quite a lot of questions in forums and blog post about inability of have LINQ to SQL object in a Workflow Foundation’s Activity execution. Most of the time, you will end up getting a error message as below
Type ‘System.Data.Linq.ChangeTracker+StandardChangeTracker’ in Assembly ‘System.Data.Linq, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089′ is not marked as serializable.
After I did some research and found out about serialization method in LINQ to SQL here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386929.aspx
Code generation in LINQ to SQL supports DataContractSerializer serialization. It does not support XmlObjectSerializer or BinaryFormatter. For more information, see Serialization (LINQ to SQL).
However for Workflow Foundation, it is using BinaryFormatter to serialize objects into persistent layer (refer the MSDN document here)
When the workflow runtime encounters a persistence point during workflow instance execution, it calls the persistence service to do the work. The persistence service will then serialize the workflow state into a stream using BinaryFormatter serialization, optionally compress it, and save it into a durable store.
As such there is a crash here which renders LINQ to SQL entities can’t be used in Workflow Foundation. Fortunately Serena Yeoh found a solution and put it into her project at Layer Sample. You can found out more at this forum thread. Basically her code will take LINQ to SQL objects, clone it and serialize it using DataContractSerializer first before committing changes. Then after that it will return the cloned copy.
More ideas for your WPF applications
thirteen23 (not 7eleven) is a design focus development company specializes in WPF application. On their website I found a few cool WPF application which not only looks nice but also showcase ability to connect to services on the cloud such as Windows Live Messenger.
Here are some samples which I think can be reused for your own enterprise app:
continuum: WPF based MSN Messenger
Foresight: A Vista gadget to help manage task + project
Mix08: a quick Vista application that lets you create your own conference schedule, keep track of times, and browse all the sessions.
about me
Hi there! My name is Patrick and I code on .NET and build a few products on SharePoint and Windows Azure. I am currently CTO of IPS Infonomics Pte Ltd and co-founder of Tech Insights Conference.
My reading list- How to Deliver a Killer Business Presentation
- 10 Hot Web Startups Changing the Face of Retail
- Visa certifies NFC-equipped Android, BlackBerry smartphones for payWave -- Engadget
- An easy way to use certificates for WCF security - CodeProject®
- 6 Things To Do when you got your Unifi Wireless Router D-Link Dir-615 « Sawanila.com™
- Controlling Registry ACL Permissions with Powershell
- Building the Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Development Environment
- Running SharePoint 2010 on a domain controller
- Using Local Machine Accounts for Managed Accounts in SharePoint 2010
- How Trello is different - Joel on Software