I spoke this week at DevConnections in Orlando. As always a great time and a good show. For those that attended my talks, thanks for the great participation and questions! For those that didn't, you really need to work harder on convincing your boss to send you to a DevConnections conference. The line up of speakers is amazing and the venue is always great.

 

The three talks I gave were on building custom activities in WF, WPF Tools, and Service Oriented workflows.

 

You can grab the slides and demos from the links below.

 

Custom WF Activities:   Slides    Demos

WPF Tools:    Slides

SO Workflows:   Slides     Demos

Enjoy!

My latest publishing project, which I haven't talked about much on the blog, is a LiveLesson training DVD on WF. This product has now released and you can find all the details here:

http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321503139

It contains about 5 hours of video instruction on the breadth of WF, including sequential workflows, state machine workflows, showing how to use each of the base activity library activities, how to communicate with workflows, how to handle exceptions, custom activities, and much more. Because of the length of the instruction, it is more of a shallow dive into each of the topics to get you started, rather than being very deep in any one area. The content is mostly Camtasia screen capture while demonstrating the techniques being discussed.

There is also a sample lesson available through YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/livelessons

If you are getting started using WF, this would be a good way to get bootstrapped.

Spread the word!

I gave a talk on WPF for ASP.NET developers this evening at the .NET SIG in Cleveland. Good size crowd and great questions. It was a challenging talk because of trying to cover all of WPF and Silverlight for ASP.NET developers and for those in the crowd who were Windows Forms developers.

I covered the various deployment models of WPF including:

- Windows Application

- XAML Browser Application (XBAP)

- Plain Old XAML Page (POXP?)

- Silverlight App

Whenever I present this stuff, the overwhelming reaction is: Stop giving us so many choices!!! We can't figure out what to use when!

There is also often a desire for a conclusion to be drawn that one of these will be the end state and all UI will be written in it. I just don't think that will be the case. I think that maybe 5 years from now, if the tools come along a lot farther than they are now, and if the control suite grows, the list of options could shorten to just WPF Windows App, Silverlight App, and ASP.NET AJAX app. But I don't think it will shrink beyond that. Windows Apps make sense when you control the desktop to take maximum advantage of the client platform and give the best user experience. Silverlight makes sense for broader reach while sticking to the same tools and programming models. ASP.NET AJAX will be broader still and will address the platforms that Silverlight can't reach, and will also (like Windows Forms) be more evolved for data over forms apps for a while to come.

Anyway, here are the slides and demos for those who are interested:

Slides    Demos

Watching Scott Guthrie's keynote at Mix07 right now. The word is finally out - and wow. Silverlight is not just a Flash alternative - it is a cross platform, cross browser .NET runtime and framework. C#, VB, any .NET language driving display in the browser, running on the client side, on other platforms.

Beta for 1.0 is out today, available on www.silverlight.net.

You can even debug cross platform with the .NET code running in a Mac browser. I think we are not far from stepping through the time space continuum now...

Some articles on employing VSTS/TFS correctly for your team

A quick ditty on what sessions I'm presenting at DevConnections this week. Expect sample code in a couple days.

A quick gushing review of Adam Nathan's WPF Unleashed

ClickOnce guidance has moved to CodePlex, here are the URLs

WPF episode on dnrTV available

NOVA Code Camp coming in April

Got my first print copy of my book

Electronic pre-published version available on rough cuts: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/0321197690

Expiring publisher certificates will break the update process of ClickOnce applications

Congratulations to Dan Kahler for coming up with the correct answer and winning a free seat in the class!

Free seat giveaway contest starts NOW!

Slides and demos from VS Connections in Vegas

How to avoid HTTP publishing errors with ClickOnce from Visual Studio

A little background on how ClickOnce distinguishes unique applications as separate installs vs updates

Get your hands on 70 pages of overview and How-To guidance on doing ClickOnce deployments, as well as a manifest manager utility that makes changing manifests easier and shows how to program against the manifest API, as well as a deployment repository provider example and more...

Smart Client Deployment with ClickOnce book site is up and available with the full book sample code in C# and VB

Some thoughts on the relative importance / need for adoption of WCF, WF, WPF, and CardSpace

Quick summary of what was covered, slides and demos links for the WF and WPF talks on our roadshow

I wrote a whitepaper on administering ClickOnce deployments earlier this year for the product team. It took a bit for it to get through the MSDN publishing process, but it is finally available.

 

You can check it out here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwinforms/html/admincodep.asp

This whitepaper covers handling tracking and authentication of users on the deployment server, as well as giving an explanation of what is going on under the covers during the publishing and deployment process.

Enjoy!

The sweet bliss of declaring manuscript complete washes over me...

Mark Michaelis joins the IDesign architecture team

Some thoughts on the complexity of WF basics...

Special promotional price for my book at bookpool.com

Sign up for the .NET 3.0 Roadshow!

Thoughts on the recent Microsoft Principles to Promote Competition

Slides and demos from the webcast

Slides and demos, get yer red hot slides and demos...

Creating a pvk file from a certificate issued spc/cer file and pvk file

Slides and demos from TechEd talks last week

Demo code and lab code for WinFX students in DC this week

Some background on the trust model of ClickOnce and how it affects what you can do through a ClickOnce deployment

Mid Atlantic Code Camp 10 June - schedule posted and volunteers needed.

Resolving CAPICOM build errors when publishing a ClickOnce application.

If you haven't stumbled on the top link on the MSDN homepage in the last 24 hours... WinFX Beta 2 is out. Finally some fresh bits that are synced up between WCF, WPF, and WF.

There is also a Go-Live license associated with all the bits, so you can get the jump on the competition by putting apps into production right away with WinFX capabilities. If you haven't started looking at WinFX capabilities yet, now is definitely the time. One good way to do so is to attend our WCF Master Class. You can find more details at http://www.idesign.net/.

You can get all the download bits for WinFX Beta 2 here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/downloads/products/getthebeta/

 

A little ditty to lead you through the process of moving ClickOnce applications into production

Slides and Demos from the Software Developers Conference in Arnhem, Netherlands from last week

Slides and demos from DevTeach

Demos from my Adv Master Class last week

Understanding what the current directory is when your ClickOnce app is running and why

If you are starting to get your hands dirty with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), you can get some great samples to help you get started from our website at http://www.idesign.net/ on the downloads tab.

http://www.idesign.net/idesign/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=5&tabid=11

 

Get your red hot slides and demos for ClickOnce, VS 2005 Settings, DAAB, and Connecting Smart Clients with WCF right here

A more comprehensive Code snippet library is now available for C#!

Slides and demos from SDDev.net talk

A little ditty on deriving from BindingSource to handle errors

Slides, Demos, and lessons learned getting the demos running on the Feb CTP of WinFx

I recorded a DNR and DNRtv last week in New London and they are already up on the site.

You can download/listen to the .NET Rocks! epsidode here: http://www.dotnetrocks.com

And the DNRtv here: http://www.dnrtv.com

In the DNR episode, we talk about data binding, ClickOnce and a few other related topics.

This DNRtv shows how to do some of the data binding stuff in the designer. Keep your eyes out for another episode in a week or so on ClickOnce deployment.

Come on out to learn about Windows Communications Foundation at MICSUG.

Adding a SQL Express Database to your Visual Studio project sets the Copy To Output Directory property to Copy Always, which will overwrite any changes from a previous debug run. Don't let this bite you. Read the details here.

Get your red-hot newsletters here.

I went up to New London this week and taped two episodes of DNRtv and one DNR with Carl and Richard. The DNRtv episodes should go up in the next two weeks, one on data binding and one on ClickOnce deployment. The DNR will air on 22 March. Check them out!

I gave a talk on data binding in NYC this Thu night. Had a great time. Lively crowd as always, lots of good questions and interaction.

Here are the slides and demos:

Slides    Demos

I've been selected as the Microsoft Regional Director for Virginia.

For the folks from my Master class in CA this week, here are the live demos. Anyone's welcome to grab them, most have project names that indicate what was being demoed.

Slides and demos from my WPF talk last night

TOC for my data binding book

Slides and demos from my Data Binding talk

My book is finally shipping!

DC VS 2005 Launch Event (the last US one) complete!

MVP Visual Developer - Solution Architect awarded for another year!

Sample Code for Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0 posted

A short description of the steps required to set up a ComboBox column in a DataGridView containing lookup values from another table.

Instructions on how to deploy and launch unmanaged applications with ClickOnce.

Demos from my ClickOnce webcast yesterday

How to have Intellisense for WCF config file entries in the November CTP of WinFx

Demos from my MSDN Webcast today

Slides and demos from my talk on Connecting Smart Client Applications with Windows Communication Foundation at Boulder.NET Users Group on Tuesday

Just a little written explanation of a sample I usually give in our master classes that demonstrates the one of the benefits of interface-based programming. It demonstrates using a factory (in this case a generic factory that can load any type and return it through an interface reference) to dynamically load components that are expected to implement an interface contract, so that clients can be coded with no specific type coupling (other than the interface contract) to the components that satisfy the contract.

Slides, demos, and brief overview of sessions today

Slides, demos, key takeaways from my ClickOnce talk yesterday

A quick overview of my session, a fix for a last second demo that went awry, and some good related references.

A nice little post on user permissions elevation in ClickOnce

Describing the learning process of getting to know Indigo / Windows Communications Foundation

Start the download rush

A quick overview of DevConnections and the sessions I'll be presenting.

I'm giving two MSDN Webcasts: Presenting Rich Tabular Data with the DataGridView Control and Deploy Smart Client Applications with ClickOnce

IDesign has a new look and feel

Slides and demos from a data bound Windows Forms 2.0 talk I gave last night in KY

Step by step of enabling and using on-demand updates with ClickOnce

Slides and demos from ClickOnce talk in St. Louis and Kansas City this week

Architecture podcast is live.

Understanding the mix of System.Transactions and connection pooling in .NET 2.0

How to data bind a ComboBox control to a child collection of objects and maintain synchronization with the parent collection

Delivered the final manuscript for my data binding book. What a relief!

Join me for the IDesign Advanced .NET Master Class in Reston, VA in October!

Speaking at TampaBay.NEt last night

Demos from today's session.

Demos from this morning's session in Amsterdam

Data Binding Demos from TechEd Europe today

User Settings will work in partial trust for RTM, but not for Beta 2

Handling custom setup steps and prerequisites in ClickOnce deployed applications - a little discussion and some supporting code

ClickOnce certificates in a nutshell key concepts

Interview with Roy Osherove on all things .NET

Extending ASP.NET Slides and Demos

Slides and demos from DevTeach today

Beware of some bugs in Beta 2 ClickOnce on-demand API.

Demos from my TechEd breakout session last week

Microsoft is giving away free copies of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 to all attendees at DevConnections in Vegas in November

Using the My feature in C#

Here's all my sessions and formal activities at TechEd

How to get Northwind on SQL Server 2005?

Here are the slides and demos from my sessions in Holland

My ClickOnce Trusted Publishers article is on the Start page in Visual Studio today - cool!

Great talk by David Chappell last night

Here are links to the slides and demos I presented

My article on configuring ClickOnce trusted publishers is up on MSDN Online.. here is the link

I gave a talk at Tulsa .NET on Monday 25 Apr, here are the slides and demos

A couple days later, but here are the slides and demos from Sunday

Cranking out the talks at Philly Code Camp

Whidbey Beta 2 is up on subscriber downloads

Here are the slides and demos from my talks in Austin and at Texas A&M the last two days

I'm giving my Extending ASP.NET talk at these two groups 11 and 12 April

The quick and dirty on deploying non-Whidbey apps with ClickOnce

Here are the slides and demos from our session Thursday at VS Connections

Here are the slides and demos from today's session

Here are the slides and demos for Smart Client Communications with the Middle Tier and Smart Client Offline Data Caching and Synchronization talks at Visual Studio Connections today

Lots of talks on smart client development in the next few months, here is the lineup

Some highlights from my talk on VS Extensibility last night

Things to know and a simple strategy for testing ClickOnce deployments

Passing on a nugget from the latest chapter I finished on my data binding book

Cool, got the notification that I am an MVP for another year.

Roy Osherove does a good job capturing the differences of our recommended process with that of the Agile camp, with a few minor clarifications

Some observations on the Dec CTP for Windows Forms development

Great little post from JayBaz about perf concerns vs clean code

Responding to a posting and one of the top issues on the Product Feedback Center

Here are the slides and demos from my Extending ASP.NET talk at LRDNUG last night

Here are my slides and demos from todays sessions at VS Connections

I was the user of a great tablet app last night at one of the restaurants at VS Connections.

Enjoying the conference at the Mandalay Bay

Here are the slides and demos from my talk on Querying XML with .NET at DelMarva.NET on 21 OCt

I am giving a talk on querying XML data with .NET tomorrow in Eastern MD

Here are the demos from today's session

Get your hot code here...

Here are the demos from today's session.

Just a little spontneous gushing for an incredible tool

A lot of people are confusing the different terminology and packaging planned for Visual Studio Team System. Here is the straight scoop, verified with the product team.

Suggest some tough data binding scenarios for my book

The trick to getting Web Services working as a Data Source for generating data bound UI in WinForms in VS2005 Beta 1

Get yer red hot demos here....

Here are the demos from today's webcast

Demos link

How to pass startup arguments to a User Interface Process v2 task

Use the mage.exe tool to create, edit, and re-sign ClickOnce manifest files

How to get command line arguments into a ClickOnce application

Here are the demos from today's webcast on ClickOnce

Finally getting past the S@&t storm of work that I set myself up with

Here are the demos from today's webcast on the DataGridView control in WinForms 2.0

Here are the links and demo code from my MSDN Webcast on VS extensibility and automation today

Here are the demos for download from today

Another side by side install, this time with Beta 1, IIS problems easily resolved

While the rest of the Windows world scrambles to install security updates for a scary new trojan, those of us with XP SP2 (RC2) install get the cheery Windows update message - no updates to install.

Here are the demos and sample publishers for the Exception Management Application Block from today's MSDN Webcast

Here is my demo code from today's webcast on the Configuration Management Application Block

Working on my productivity by checking out a bunch of new tools this weekend

I'll be doing an MSDN Webcast on the CMAB Monday 11 am PST

Excellent idea and article from Roy Osherove

Links to my demos and slides from today's MSDN Webcast on the UIP

Web setup project uninstall is leaving stuff in the metabase that sometimes interferes with reinstall

Here are the slides and demos I gave at DevEssentials in KC this weekend

Found the solution to an MSDN Library problem with VS 2005 May CTP in the *updated* readme on the vs2005 site

Download link and info for the demos for my MSDN webcast today

My slides and demos from my Deployment talk last hour

The App blocks continue to be a popular topic and they are evolving as we speak

Enjoying the smart client focused track sessions

Come learn about deploying .NET apps on Friday 28 May at TechEd

Come talk about the Microsoft Application Blocks at my BOF on Tuesday night

Come learn about the future of auto-deployed smart client .NET apps

An approach to mixing ASP.NET Forms authentication and Windows authentication and authorization using an Enterprise Service component

A lot of people get wrapped up thinking of Enterprise Services as legacy and COM, both are wrong

Don't pursue performance in every line of code - the result is a more brittle system that may have had adequate performance in the first place

A week in Redmond is like a kid being set free in a toy factory

Fixing up side by side install again

Duncan points to Nathan who has created a collection of PInvoke signatures to save others from trying to get them right.

A quick tutorial on hosting multiple communities with a single installation of the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

Fixing an errant reg key fixes IIS after VS 2005 CTP install

Installed VS.NET 2003 and 2005 side by side, no major problems noted yet, other than IIS

More little side effects of installing VS.NET 2005 CTP - IIS Manager broken

Installed the Tech Preview without a hitch, implications for Yukon though

Code expansion complements Intellisense nicely in VS.NET Whidbey, but will it be as good as QuickCode.NET?

A brief discussion of picking the right model for querying and navigating your XML data

Mind wave coherency with Kirk Allen Evans, but his solution is better

Done teaching a .NET Master Class in Chicago

WMI Exposes a lot of information that is easy to get at through managed code, if you can crack the code on what to ask for

Another Redmond pilgrimage this week

Soliciting input for future content in asp.netPRO magazine

Win32 API to .NET Framework map on MSDN

My ClickOnce interview on .NET Rocks! went live this morning

A few thoughts on the realm of options available

Can't expose interface-based properties if you want to XmlSerialize

Giving training days in DC and NYC on 3 Feb and 30 Mar, respectively

Short notice talk tonight at the Maryand VB and Access User Group

My article on the subject is live on asp.netPRO and will be in the next issue

Just finished taping an episode of .NET Rocks! with Carl Franklin, much fun

Starting 2004 right with a data bound WinForms book project for Addison Wesley

A great example of where the extensibility of the Exception Management application block could have saved the day - but couldn't because it wasn't used.

A failed attempt at side-by-side Whidbey and Vs.NET 2003 installs

Clearing up common misconceptions with ClickOnce