The installation broke several times with Error 1330:

"… d:\cab11.cab has an invalid digital signature …"

I tried copying the installation files to HDD, another installation media, mounting the ISO image - all to no avail.

Finally I found a blog post on the issue by Heath Stewart. Within the comments to his post he recommends to

check your performance settings, to see if the failed machines are set for Background Service Optimization? Also, are these Win2K3 machines or what platform are they?

On Vista: "Start"->Right click on Computer, select Properties. On the left, select "Advanced System Properties", click "Settings" under "Performance", then click the "Advanced" tab. Is "Programs" or "Background services" checked.

I switched the performance settings to "Programs" and also defragmented the target disk with the build-in defragmenter. Afterwards the installation ran perfectly fine.

So, here you go!  Sixty Five Videos and Virtual Labs to make you a WCF Expert !

If you’re interested in the WCF Web Programming Model (RESTful WCF), you might take a look at Steve Maine’s WCF Web Programming Model Documentation.

If you’re a VB developer LINQ to XSD won’t mean anything to you. C# developers will now be able to work with LINQ to XML in a type-safe manner:

The LINQ to XSD preview illustrates our initial thinking on a strongly-typed programming experience over LINQ to XML. Instead of working with untyped XML trees, LINQ to XSD allows you to program in terms of strongly-typed classes, generated based on an XSD schema.

Although LINQ to XSD fits into MS’s strongly typed thinking, you’ll loose the benefits of untyped XML trees, such as a uniform interface for accessing XML.

The most important difference when designing RESTful and SOAP/WS-* web services is their view on models and processes. In my opinion REST demands a complete new way of designing services. Stefan provides a nice example of RESTful design on InfoQ.

Ganesh Prasad delves in the differences (or similarities) by setting up a Namespace-Time continuum, which should unify both approaches.  Mark Baker responds and Ganesh updates his view.

Mark argues that “WS-* fails to separate interface from implementation, while REST does”. He provides an example task of changing the implementation of an interface and asks the question: “if I change the implementation of a component from a stock quote service to a weather report, does the interface have to change? If yes, then prima facie you haven’t decoupled interface from implementation, have you?”.

Ganesh responds:

Now, as an architect, I am rather sensitive to issues of tight coupling, and have often railed against examples of this, such as the SOAP-RPC style itself and the generation of WSDL files from Java implementation classes. But Mark goes much further. He would like to change the implementation of a service from a Stock Quote service to a Weather Report, and he would like to see his interface unchanged! To my mind, this goes beyond the reasonable.

I especially like and agree with his statement that Mark’s change is like “changing from pasta to soup, and expecting to continue using a fork”. It appears to me that both are talking about the same thing from a different perspective. Mark refers to the “technical” generic interface provided by REST only, whereas Ganesh concerns himself with the service design.

The RESTful approach demands a mapping of service design logic to a combination of HTTP/REST verb and URI. Every combination has to be interpreted in order to get its meaning. In most cases the meaning is obvious, in some it isn’t. Thus the RESTful service design has to put a strong emphasis on a very slick choice of meaningful URIs, especially when setting aside a service definition, such as WADL.

ReSharper comes to the rescue, but it doesn’t support C# 3.0, yet. David Hayden shows how to get along with Visual Studio 2008 regarding namespaces:

It turns out, Visual Studio 2008 actually has good support for resolving namespaces and optmizing using statements that can get you the functionality if you are not using ReSharper.

[…]

Pressing Ctrl + . will bring up a context-sensitive menu that allows you to add a using statement or optionally fully qualify the path to the class.

[…]

The other nice thing that ReSharper does is remove unused using statements using Ctrl+Alt+O.

We can get that using Visual Studio 2008, because you may have noticed the cool context-sensitive Organize Usings Option:

[…]

I’ve quit hoping for something like “Call Hierarchy” within Visual Studio or at least ReSharper, but David’s tip saved me from uninstalling VS 2008.

Concerning XML vs. DSL:

If you need to do things externally, a DSL is the place to look for. In fact, if you feel the urge to put XML into place, as anything except strict data storage mechanism, that is a place to go with a DSL.

DSL vs. Fluent Interface:

Fluent Interfaces relies heavily on intellisense in order to create that fluent feeling. If you need to work on it outside the IDE, that is probably going to be a factor.

Extensibility is also a concern; let us go back to the scheduling sample. We have the scheduling engine, and we have the tasks themselves. Consider that to write a task using a DSL I usually have to write a small text file, but to write a task using a Fluent Interface requires creating a project, compiling, etc.

I totally agree with Ayende. A DSL is the perfect means for supporting external aspects of a software development project, especially when non-programmers are involved.

Although the content of Larry’s talk is well worth watching it

He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you’ve ever seen.

it is the show that impressed me most.

Larry uses a style (slides & talk), which most of you might already know from the Identity 2.0 talk by Dick Hardt. What sets them apart (at least from my point of view) is that Dick is overdoing it (a bit) and Larry seems to have found the right doses (for me).

Anyhow, the show is a must-see!

Great news. Get ready!

In his first post he give a rough overview of the popular and not so popular new features. One of these features is the new Web Programming Model. Although support for RESTful Services is an important feature for the next version of the .NET Framework, I’m wondering, whether a slick light-weight solution (such as Mindtouch Dream), which remains true to the principles and simplicity of REST, isn’t much better suited than an all-in-one silver-bucket attempt.

Dominick Baier joins in and writes about Usernames over Transport Authentication in WCF.

In his most recent blog post Christian publishes a list of all updated/new WS-* specs in WCF v2.

The basic idea is to map (friendly) URLs to the actions of your controllers:

Suppose you want to offer listing of say, cars. You want that the urls show the data that is being queries on the resource identifier, not through the query string (have you read about REST?).

Something like:

www.cardealer.com/listings/ -> can list all or show a search page, up to you
www.cardealer.com/listings/new/ -> shows a nationwide list of new cars
www.cardealer.com/listings/old/ -> shows a nationwide list of second hand cars
www.cardealer.com/listings/new/ford -> new ford cars
www.cardealer.com/listings/new/toyota -> new toyota cars

In order to allow for friendly URLs you’ll have to remove all script mappings from your web site and route all requests to the ASP.NET ISAPI extension. Many people don’t like the idea, stating that “no one would do or want to do such a  thing”. What’s the problem with this approach? I’ve been developing web applications for several years (as part of enterprise applications) and I’ve never experienced the need to serve static content. What’s the use of databases then? However, if you want to serve static content as well, you might follow David Moore’s suggestion to “have the web site and a separate web site to handle static content (images/css/js)”.

The Routing Engine is configured in the Application Start event:

RoutingModuleEx.Engine.Add(
    PatternRule.Build(“bycondition”, “listings/<cond:new|old>”, typeof(SearchController), “View”));

This piece of code tells the engine to route URL-requests such as “/listings/new” or “listings/old” to the SearchController’s View action/method, which expects a parameter called “cond”. The parameter values might be “new” or “old”. The StandardUrlRules utility class allows to easily define generic patterns for all actions/methods of a controller.

The code is available from the MonoRail SVN repository.

Scott Guthrie announces ASP.NET MVC Framework at ALT.NET conference. There have been rumors about an MVC Framework for ASP.NET in March 2007, already.   Jeffrey Palermo  wrote about a special meeting with Scott Guthrie on the MVP Summit. Now Scott officially announces the framework and claims that we might expect a first CTP within the next two months and a V1 in Spring 2008. Jeffrey has the details.

He names some of the goals:

• Natively support TDD model for controllers.
• Provide ASPX (without viewstate or postbacks) as a view engine
• Provide a hook for other view engines from MonoRail, etc.
• Support IoC containers for controller creation and DI on the controllers
• Provide complete control over URLs and navigation
• Be pluggable throughout
• Separation of concerns
• Integrate nicely within ASP.NET
• Support static as well as dynamic languages

Nima Dilmaghani provides further details on Scott’s talk and the integration points for existing ASP.NET technology and other frameworks such as Castle’s MonoRail and Windsor. Even Roy Osherove praises the new MVP Framework for ASP.NET:

My take away - finally they get it. I wish there were more guthries out there in the b0rg.

Regarding the impact on MonoRail Jeffrey says:

MonoRail is MVC.  This is MVC, so yes, it’s very similar but different.  This gives us a controller that executes before a view ever comes into play, and it simplifies ASPX as a view engine by getting rid of viewstate and server-side postbacks with the event lifecycle.  That’s about it.  MonoRail is much more.  MonoRail has tight integration with Windsor, ActiveRecord and several view engines.  MonoRail is more than just the MVC part.  I wouldn’t be surprised if MonoRail were refactored to take advantage of the ASP.NET MVC HttpHandler just as a means to reduce the codebase a bit.  I think it would be a very easy move, and it would probably encourage MonoRail adoption (even beyond its current popularity).

The Castle PMC has a similar take on the issue:

We also believe that MonoRail has been providing the same thing for the past two and half years, and will continue to do so. We’re grateful that MS has chosen to offer integration points for Monorail and the Castle stack and as soon as it’s available we will be working to integrate it with the rest of our projects.

Is MS’ MVC better? Worse? Only once we have used both will we be able to tell.

I would like to agree with Jeffrey that this might encourage MonoRail adoption. At least both frameworks would share some common concepts and the programming models won’t differ that much anymore. But common sense tells me that MSFT might try to do business as usual, i.e. make a (bad) copy of a good concept and get rid of the competing framework/tool along the way. I’ll have to put my faith in Scott ;-) (who’s proven to deserve as much several times).

Scott Guthrie announces today that Microsoft will offer “the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them” later this year.

According to Daniel Moth

The cool bit is not that you can just read the framework code in your favourite text editor once you download and accept the license; no, the real goodness is that when you debug your applications with Visual Studio 2008 you will have the option to debug right down into the Framework code (with an autodownload feature from an MSDN server)!

Scott Hanselman has a Podcast on the topic and Channel9 will be publishing a video at the end of the week.

The duck typing library is a .NET class library written in C# that enables duck typing. Duck typing is a principle of dynamic typing in which an object’s current set of methods and properties determines the valid semantics, rather than its inheritance from a particular class. (For a detailed explanation, see the Wikipedia article.)

Beyond simple duck typing, this library has evolved to include different forms of variance in class members and other advanced features.

Very cool: “Although there is a performance hit when a new proxy type is generated, use of the casted object is virtually as fast to call as the object itself. Reflection.Emit is used to emit IL that directly calls the original object.”

Can’t wait for C# 3.0 and LINQ? Well you don’t have to! Dynamically query SQL databases today in LINQ: no more struggling with antiquated SQL. Download LINQPad and kiss goodbye to SQL Management Studio: LINQPad supports LINQ to objects, LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML—in fact, everything in C# 3.0 and .NET Framework 3.5. LINQPad is also a terrific learning tool for experimenting with this exciting new technology.

Joseph Albahari, co-author of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, has published LINQPad (Beta) on his website. LINQPad requires .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 and allows to issue dynamic LINQ queries to SQL Server databases. It’s a great way to get acquainted with LINQ and to get to know its workings. Got, get it!