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.