Web Service Software Factory for WCF

The second version of the Web Service Software Factory has released. This new release has everything the first one had with the addition of loads of new stuff specifically for building WCF Web services using VS 2005. Though this was released in Jan itself, I couldn't peep into it for quite sometime.

The new features help you apply message-level security, construct services from WSDL/XSD, perform design-time code/config analysis, apply message validation, and migrate from ASMX services. If you're building WCF Web services, you would surely want to check this out at Web Service Software Factory.

Prescriptive Guidance for VSTS available now

The Patterns & Practices team at MS have come out with a new prescriptive guidanse for VSTS and can be available at http://www.codeplex.com/VSTSGuidance. Here you can find information on Practices, Source Control/Versioning, Extensibility, Project/Process Management, TFS, build, work items, reporting and much more.

Via: J D Meier

Recommended Reading: NULL Vs NULL

Mike Coles has posted a follow-up article "NULL Vs NULL" to his previous article "Four Rules On Nulls"

I noticed that SET ANSI_NULLS is been deprecated and will be removed in future versions only when I read this article. Now I have started looking for other deprecated features in SQL 2005. How I see that MS has not documented alternatives for SET ANSI_NULLS and few opther deprectaed features. Check Deprecated Database Engine Features in SQL Server 2005 for more details.

Implementing STS for Infocards

I have been trying to use Infocards in my WinFX app and had some problems in using them. I was not able to import my self-created Infocards into my identity store. The problem was that when importing the infocard into the identity store, it was checking for the provider address where an STS(Security Token Service) needs to be running which was not the case in my system. Searching for a solution came across this STS implementation in Martin Gudgin's blog.

Adobe Illustrator to XAML Export Plug-In

Michael Swanson has created an Adobe Illustrator Plug-in that exports images to XAML for use in Avalon. With only a few minor color saturation issues, the plug-in is able to faithfully reproduce almost any image from Illustrator into XAML.

Michael Swanson has done a really amazing job. Actually I was searching for a way out to provide a dynamic UI builder for my WPF app and ended up in this plug-in. The plug-in gives out XAML syntax that is compatible with the February 2006 CTP and later (including Beta 2).

Read more about the plug-in here...

Download the plug-in here...

US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletin for 2005

Happened to read the US-CERT cyber security bulletin summary. It reads...

"...The information is presented only as a index with links to the US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletin the information was published in. There were 5198 reported vulnerabilities: 812 Windows operating system vulnerabilities; 2328 Unix/Linux operating vulnerabilities; and 2058 Multiple operating system vulnerabilities..."

However, they have put a disclaimer stating that the results are an aggregation of reports from various sources.

TechEd 2006

I had the opportunity of attending the TechEd 2006 at Chennai. That was great rocking TechEd. However, when compared to the previous TechEds, I felt the liveliness was missing. More so, could be due to that instead of a live keynote session, this time they had a video played which didn't help to kick start the enthusiasm.

The Architect track sessions were more in a Business Process perspective, had little of technology. I request the oprganisers to please note that architects in India are techies who love to understand the new technologies and use them in their solutions. And due to this, the people who had registered for architect track, actually attended the developer track.

WinFX sessions where good. Mostly they were kind of introductory sessions rather than deep dives, except for the session on WCF by Gaurav Khanna. His session on CLR hosting was an eye-opener to understand the way CLR worked and how to extend the CLR capabilities in v2.0.

The security sessions by Vineet Gupta was very useful in the sense, developers got an idea of the things they could do out-of-the-box to aid security, showing security is not something outside the app, but something that runs through the app from the presentation layer to the DB.

For people who missed the TechEd 2006, you could get the presentations downloaded from http://www.techedindia.com