We are gearing up for another code camp in the DC/Northern Virginia area. It will be held at the Microsoft Reston training facility on Nov 17th.

We have a great set of tracks lined up, and now we just need to fill them with all the brilliant speakers in the area. So if you are willing to come share your expertise with your fellow developers in the area, please lend a hand.

Jeff Schoolcraft has a nice description of each of the tracks and what we are looking for here.

You can find the full details on the code camp here. You'll need to register and login to submit your abstracts.

Thanks and hope to see you there!

Thursday, October 04, 2007 10:27:51 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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My colleagues and I from IDesign are currently hitting 6 cities across the US over this week and next (Ft Lauderdale, Atlanta, and Dallas this week, Denver, Minneapolis, and Boston next week) showcasing .NET 3.5 technologies. I'm giving the sessions on WPF and WF.

For those who attended: thanks for being a great audience!

You can grab the demos here.

Thursday, September 13, 2007 12:50:40 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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Beta 2 is finally here. Got it installed last night and of course one of the first things I wanted to play with is the WPF designer to see how far it had come along since Beta 1 and the Nov CTP tools for VS 2005.

Positives:

• The designer surface itself has come a long way and the snap lines, margin guides, and other adornments to help get elements positioned within the UI and visualize what underlying layout properties have been set looks really nice.
• There is a zoom control that makes it really easy to zoom in and out with smooth scaling to focus on the parts of the UI you are working on as a nice alternative to scrolling.
• They have a great little breadcrumb control at the bottom that lets you see where you are in the element hierarchy and even gives you a pop-up rendering of the other items in the hierarchy as you hover the mouse over them (see below).
• Picks up container locations such as grid cell when you drag and drop a control.
• The properties grid is fixed as far as being able to edit collection properties such as the RowDefinitions and ColumnDefinitions properties of a Grid.
• The XAML editor has improved IntelliSense with icons that help identify different constructs (namespaces, classes, etc when the IntelliSense list is up. The IntelliSense includes listing available namespaces with a clr-namespace construct for types in the project. Once the clr-namespace has been added, custom types show up in the IntelliSense tag list. Nice.
• Common WPF constructs (Window, Page, UserControl) are in the Add > menu from the project.
• Double click to hook up default event! Finally!

There are still a number of annoying aspects that I sure hope will be worked out by release.

Negatives:

• Designer load time: Still takes a really long time to load an empty form in the designer.
• Properties grid: No option to sort the properties alphabetical, so you still need to scroll around looking for what category the property you care about might be lurking in. Unfortunately no property search like Blend has.
• XAML Editor: Still does not add closing element tags when you create an open element tag. Very annoying productivity hit wen forced to bang out XAML by hand. Fills everything that is not inside an element tag with a cyan background. There does not appear to be any way to customize this.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with what I see. I think I can finally ditch using the Nov CTP in VS2005 for WPF development! I'll still be using a mix of this and Blend though.

Saturday, July 28, 2007 2:33:11 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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I gave a talk on Connecting Applications with WCF to the Space Coast .NET and Orlando .NET User Groups over the last two nights. Had great attendance and questions, thanks to all who attended.

If you want the key takeaway from the talk (other than the demos and mechanics of how to connect two applications with WCF and use different bindings and capabilities of WCF), here is the elevator pitch.

WCF is a remote communications technology based on SOAP messaging. It is interoperable, powerful, flexible, easy to maintain, and supercedes all the previous remoting technologies in the .NET space:

• .NET Remoting
• ASP.NET Web Services
• Enterprise Services (COM+ for .NET)
• MSMQ

Basically, if you are writing a new application or new portion of an application that needs to make remote calls, use WCF and forget all the above exist. WCF gives you a single API for doing remote communications that rolls up all the capabilities of the technologies listed above, allowing you to write your code with most of the details of the remote communications abstracted away. This allows you to change major aspects of your remote communications approach, such as wire level protocol, encoding, security mechanisms, reliability, etc. without touching your programmatic code - you just modify config file settings. If you need to switch from TCP sockets with binary encoding to HTTP SOAP XML messaging, it literally takes about 30 seconds of editing your config files to do so.

There are a few fringe cases such as interoperating with a legacy .NET Remoting app, or certain advanced features of MSMQ that you will not be able to do with WCF, but for 98% of the remote communications needs out there, WCF is the choice you should make.

If you want the slides and demos I presented, you can grab them here:

Slides     Demos

Friday, July 20, 2007 1:54:28 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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In my ClickOnce book, I talk about David Guyer's excellent tool for creating Bootstrapper manifests for a custom bootstrapper item for your ClickOnce deployed applications. The URL I gave in the book is no longer valid, the BMG has been moved to codeplex at the following address:

http://www.codeplex.com/bmg

Basically, this tool gives you a nice dialog driven interface on the XML manifest files that make it so you can just check a box in Visual Studio (the Publish tab of project properties, Prerequisites button) to select your custom installers to be included in the bootstrapper setup.exe that is generated by ClickOnce. 

Tuesday, July 17, 2007 11:34:41 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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I've had a number of requests to get an errata out for my Data Binding book. Luckily, the editors at AW did a wonderful job so the number of errors is really low for a first edition book. But there were a few little things here and there that should be noted.

You can download the errata for the book here:

http://www.softinsight.com/databindingbook/Errata%20for%20Data%20Binding%20with%20Windows%20Forms%202.0.doc

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 11:26:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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I get a lot of questions about what kinds of windows can be created from where in WPF when I give WPF talks. In a talk in Cleveland the other night, there was an attendee who was concerned because he didn't see a way to set a parent window for another window, and thought that is why they did not include an MDI windowing style in WPF.

If you want to set up a window ownership model in WPF like you did in Windows Forms, you just need to look at the Owner property, instead of Parent. The behavior is not exactly the same, but a lot of the same concepts apply.

If you create a window instance and set its Owner property to a reference to another Window, then when you show the child window it will always be displayed on top of the Owner window. This is typically used when creating an application modal dialog, but it behaves that way even if you show the window with a call to Show vs ShowDialog. The latter just adds the behavior that you cannot select the owner window and interact with it while the dialog is in place. When you call Show on an owned window, the user can still move the window out of the way, click on the owner window and interact with controls in that window. You could do this to create a floating tool palette window for example.

The fact that there is not a built-in implementation of MDI doesn't mean the framework doesn't support it, the WPF team just decided to leave that out of scope for the initial (v 3.0) release because very few applications are built from scratch with the MDI model these days.

If you really want MDI, you have two choices:

• Write it yourself. This would be a little tricky because you would have to detect Window movement and either prevent them from leaving the horizontal or vertical constraints of their owner window's client area, or you would have to deal with how to do clipping of the contained windows, because WPF does not clip by default.
• Adopt Acropolis. This framework is coming out in the Orcas timeframe and provides a modular WPF architecture based on concepts carried over from the Composite UI Application Block and the Smart Client Software Factory. It adds better support for inexperienced programmers to use the framework, adds pre-built components, a great design time interaction, and certain other application level support - such as an MDI application model.

Another window management question that often comes up is to ask whether you can use Windows Forms windows or Windows Forms message boxes within your WPF application. The short answer is - yes you can. You can simply construct a Windows Forms Form class and call show and it will just be another top level window presented by your application. Since Windows Forms message boxes really just make an interop call into the OS to display an OS message box, that is of course supported too. However, WPF has its own MessageBox class, so using Windows Forms MessageBoxes is really only interesting while migrating an existing Windows Forms application to WPF.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 11:21:45 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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More security is a good thing. At least until it starts to cause you pain and suffering, and then it is easy to either decide that more security is bad or that the software that is providing you better security is bad. But the fact is, more security is a good thing, and you will be better off if you learn how to exist in that more constrained world rather than live free and unprotected. Gosh, that started to sound like a pro-Bush  restriction of freedoms post... lets get back to the tech quick.

The biggest pain points in adopting Windows Vista are usually due to non-existent, incompatible, or poorly written drivers. This is not Microsoft's fault, but the hardware vendor's fault. The next one that hits you in the face after you get past your driver pain is the fact that Microsoft is getting smarter and smarter (and more protective of you and your machine) with each new software product they put out. IE7 and Windows Vista definitely fall into this realm.

If your machine is set up as a standalone machine, or as part of a workgroup network (i.e. most home users), there is a subtle little security setting in IE7 that may cause you pain and suffering as a developer as you migrate to IE7 or Windows Vista.

Specifically, you may get prompted for credentials when accessing a local machine virtual directory when you think you have integrated authentication enabled and you shouldn't be prompted.

To explain why this occurs and how to fix it, lets first quickly recap life as we knew it in Windows XP and Server 2003 prior to IE7.

If you are working with web projects from your local machine, you will likely be creating virtual directories or IIS applications on your local install of IIS.

Turning On Integrated Windows Authentication in IIS

On XP, if you set the security settings for the site with Integrated Windows Security enabled and Anonymous Access disabled (see figure below), then when you browse to that local site from IE on the local machine, Windows automatically negotiates authentication between the browser and IIS and passes your logged in user credentials to the server (which is on the same machine), and you are let into the site or page (assuming your user account has ACL access to the underlying folders/files). In other words - integrated security does its job behind the scenes and you don't get prompted for credentials, but you are accessing the site with your logged in user credentials.

On Windows Vista, the security settings on the site are a little different, but basically mean the same thing. The corresponding authentication settings for Vista/IIS7 are shown in the figure below. Specifically, set Anonymous Authentication to Disabled, and Windows Authentication to Enabled.

IE7 Intranet Security Settings

If you are configured as a workgroup from a network perspective, when you first try to access a localhost web site, you might (or more importantly might not) notice an information bar at the top of IE telling you that Internet security settings are being applied to the Intranet zone by default. It gives you an opportunity to click on the info bar and revert to Intranet settings if you like. If you don't, after a certain number of prompts (which I don't know how many there are, it may just be once), it will stop telling you that.

The issue is that IE will set the Intranet zone security to automatically detect the network. However, depending on your connectivity, network setup, and possibly the celestial alignment of Jupiter and Venus, it will not detect that localhost is in fact in the Intranet zone. In a Windows domain this should not be a problem, but standalone it definitely is.

Because it can't tell that localhost is in fact local intranet, it plays it safe and applies internet zone security to the site. And with the default security settings, automatic authentication through Windows is disabled in the internet zone. Thus the prompt for credentials when you hit your localhost site through the browser.

The Fix

The fix is quite simple... just hard to find unless you are a psychic or know super brilliant people like Chris Kinsman or Kate Gregory.

To get back to behavior like you are used to on your retro XP box, go into IE Internet Options, Security tab. Select the Local Intranet zone, and press the Sites button (see below).

In the popup (see below), uncheck the "Automatically detect intranet network" box and make sure the three child check boxes are checked. Click OK and you should be back to integrated security as you know and love it.

Friday, June 15, 2007 10:07:04 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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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!

.NET | .NET 3.0 | Publishing

Thursday, June 14, 2007 4:17:17 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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