Lars Wilhelmsen

Tonight I held a talk for the Norwegian .NET User Group Oslo on “What’s new in WCF 4.0”. The feedback was good and I think it went fairly well, especially considered the time I’ve had to prepare.

There should probably have been more time allocated for demonstrations but to cover all the areas of improvements in WCF (and related technologies) I really need (at least) 45 minutes. If I’m asked to do this talk for other NNUG chapters (or internal for other companies/clients) I think it would be wise to either cut down on the content – and only mention the left out parts briefly – or extend it to a two hour talk.

If you attended the talk, I would love feedback (both positive & negative), comments, questions, speaking & consultancy offers. Contact me at lw at miles dot no

You can download the slides here.

I’m currently preparing my talk for next Tuesday – “What’s new in WCF 4.0” and one of the features I want to talk about is the new WS-Discovery implementation. My only problem so far (until today) was that I couldn’t find the bits on the Virtual PC Image! I have been searching high and low with .NET Reflector – to no luck.

So I wrote a post in the WCF forum and asked if anyone knew where I could find it. No good answers, so I sent the question to a couple of the PM’s in Connected Systems Division that I know work with WCF. No answer. Finally I turned to the Email form on Nicholas Allen’s blog – and he was kind enough to mail me back.

Turn out that the bits is in the System.WorkflowServiceModel – one of the assemblies I didn’t bother to search since I thought they only contained Workflow-specific bits…

The invitation to the talk on Tuesday can be found here (In Norwegian). I’m hoping for at least 70-80 attendees.

Today, August 15th, is the last day you get a discount when you sign up for the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2008, held in  Los Angeles, CA.

I have not been sure if I was going to make it to the PDC this year, giving that I’ve just started in a new company and I didn’t know on beforehand if the customer’s project manager would approve. I really thought TechEd EMEA would be more realistic, but today I actually managed to pull it off.

The answers was:

• Miles: Of course, Lars! Go to the PDC.
• Customer’s PM: Of course Lars! Go to the PDC.
• @ home: Of course Lars! Go to the PDC.

So today I have signed up! Reserved a hotel room at the Miyako Hotel and ordered plane tickets through Seat24 with Continental Airlines. There’s a stop in Newark, NJ both to & from, but hopefully I’ll manage.

So, the thing to do now is to get an overview over the sessions that Microsoft has been announced.

At last – It was pretty obvious with the SP1 dependency in SQL Server 2008 RTM that was released last week. The SP1 will definitely be on my TODO list for tomorrow.

Get it here.

Some time ago, a user with the nickname refaeldakar asked in the WCF/MSDN forum how he could serve PDFs with the WebHttpBinding so that where shown as inline attachments in the web browser.

I wrote a small test application that did what he asked for. The trick here is to add an extra HTTP header to the outgoing response to the web browser; Content-disposition: “inline; filename=filenamehere.pdf".

The code can be found on here.

So, since I’ve been quite active on the MSDN forum site lately (mainly the WCF forum) there is a growing list of issues / features / quirks I am starting to get familiar with.

The most annoying “feature” (it was really bad a couple of weeks ago) is that you have to re-login quite often – even though you have selected “save LiveID and password” on the login page. As far as I know, they have fixed this on the new forum site, http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/ . Other quirks is that the post editor is really buggy in Firefox – if you want to insert a hyperlink, add a code sample or change the text color etc. the whole page will scroll to the top when you click the given button in the editor. All the text you have entered in the text area can also disappear if the underlying JavaScript logic is in a bad mood.

Well, that was a short rant about the some of the shortcomings of the existing forum site, where the WCF forum currently reside. They will hopefully migrate it *very soon now* .

The new forum site looks promising – a bit Web2.0ish with features like auto-update when new things are posted etc.

Since I’m anticipating the new forum, I came to think of a nice-to-have tool that I have looked for before; an offline client (like a NNTP news reader) for the MSDN Forum. Last time I checked, there was none, but a quick search now revealed a relatively new CodePlex project; MSDN Forums Client.

It is still in the planning phase, so the only releases available on the project site is document describing the project scope and a draft for the requirements document. I’ve read through the documents, and the first thing that strikes me is the resemblance of Outlook Express / Windows Mail (something that I notice other people have mentioned on the front-page discussion as well).

Even tough I like the idea of an open project with available source code on CodePlex, why don’t they rather extend their existing NNTP client ( a.k.a. a part of the functionality in O.E / W.M) with some forum-specific functionality?

There hasn’t been any activity on the project since April, so for now, I think I’m adding the project’s news feed to my blog roll and wait for some real action / CTP / source code.

Ok, I’ve bought some wordpress.com credits and pointed one of my domains, larswilhelmsen.com to larsw.wordpress.com. To break the no-blogging spell, I hope that starting fresh on a new site will help to get my fingers moving

Currently, I’m on paternity leave, and when I start working again, it will be for Miles, Norway as a senior consultant. I will mainly do Microsoft- and Agile-related work and I am really looking forward to start.

While I’m away from work, I try to help out as much as I can in the Windows Communication Foundation (“Indigo”) MSDN Forum. If you have any questions regarding WCF, feel free to post in the group, or send me an e-mail.

In this blog I will mainly focus on Connected Systems; SOA/WCF, Smart Clients (including CAB/SCSF), synchronization and Live Mesh – when the API’s are out.

Wish me luck

–larsw