If you haven't seen it advertised - I am doing a WebCast on WCF/WF integration next Wednesday at 10 am Pacific time.
Signup link : http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032381608&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US
Hope to see many of you virtually there :)
That some spammer thought my wiki pages where hit enough to warrant modifying them on a daily basis with links to various "odd" sites ;-)
Thanks to Craig I've upgraded to FlexWiki 2.0 and now those pages are locked down - I apologize if you've visited them and they haven't been right, should be ok from now on.
Mostly this post is here to motivate me to actually get this book done ASAP -
Yes - I am writing a book on WCF and REST. Not a big suprise ;-)
I was tagged by Scott - here we go:
How old were you when you started programming?
I was probably 11 or 12. I had a Commodore Vic 20 :-)
What was your first language?
Basic.
What was the first real program you wrote?
I wrote a program on my Vic20 to generate Dungeon and Dragons characters.
What was your first professional programming gig?
I build an ASP web site for the University of Minnesota Law School
What's the most fun you've ever had...programming?
Hmm - this is pretty hard. I think the most fun I've ever was last fall I got hired to prototype something and what I ended up doing totally exceeded the expectations of the people who asked me to build it. It was fun making it work and then fun seeing the reactions.
I choose to tag no one (stopping the meme from my part of the tree ;-)).
One question I was asked during my web cast yesterday about calling WCF services from Silverlight is if the service could be a workflow service. I said - "Of course" - not knowing that it was a little more complex than that :)
That said - here is a sample.
SilverLightUsingWorkflow.zip (535.08 KB)
Unfortunately I don't have time to go into the details right now - working on another project at the moment. The key to making it work is setting the instanceid context to null on the server when the "last" operation is called - in this case the operation implemented inside of the eventhandler which causes this state-machine workflow to move to the completed state (so that the client can then start a new workflow).
I hope to find an more elegant and automatic solution - but this works for now (Hope you are listening Jason from the webcast - this ones for you ;-))
I did a webcast on using WCF from Silverlight 2.0 this morning - I think you can see the replay here in about 24-hours - http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032380766&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US
If you watched (or watch the replay) here is the code:
webcastcode.zip (3.46 MB)For those of you that attended my session - here is the code.
BizTalkREST.zip (124.85 KB)Glav posts about a problem I've also had recently - that Matt helped me figure out how to solve.
The exception is (repeated here for seach purposes):
Description: An unhandled
exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review
the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the
code.
Exception Details: System.ArgumentException: This collection already contains an address
with scheme http. There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection.
Parameter name: item
The way to solve this problem is to setup multiple web sites in IIS (rather than having one site that has multiple Host entries) - and point all the websites to the same directory.
Hope this helps someone.
Here you go:
For those who attended the session - thanks! It was a load of fun - as you who didn't see the session can see in this picture:
If you did attend the session and haven't done an evaluation - please do one! Thanks
Thanks to everyone who attended - here is the link to my demos:
If you did come to the session - please remember to fill out the evaluation on commnet. Remember - 9 is the best score! ;-). Thanks
I guess this is the week for my articles to go online :) Now my WF/WCF integration article is on MSDN. Hope you find it helpful.
Is up on MSDN - will be in the June edition of the analog magazine as well.
Sun is not having a good quarter. This reminded me of a few things that have been bugging me lately. I remember going to a live presentation of Scott McNealy's when he was creating a Java terminal/workstation. I remember hearing him say something to the effect of "This is the Windows-killer, in a year no one will buy PCs with Windows - everyone including your secretaries will be using these workstations". Of course, none of his predictions came to pass, and so the company still limps on.
My philosophy has always been that actually building a better technology and making it a success has nothing to do with talking about how world-changing it will be. In fact, I have always thought the opposite. I think showing people what a technology is capable of is better than just talking about what it’s going to do in the market, or that's it’s the next "x-killer". Sure, you can say, "See how great the y feature of this product is", but predictions as to success and reach just sound dumb to me.
I've always really disliked Scott McNealy, not because he was loud, and not because he hated Microsoft, but because he always talked about how this new thing Sun was doing was going to be the Microsoft/Windows-killer. How about just making a great technology? And then after it becomes the "X killer", you can boast.
A number of things I've heard or seen lately remind me of Scott McNealy. I wish people would just do cool things or build cool things without talking about what the effect of that thing will be. Even if the person might be really cool and super-smart, or even if the technology might be the most important thing to computer science ever, how about just showing us what you've done or built. Accolades will naturally come given the right ideas or actions.
I've always thought that if you talk about how important something will be before it becomes important, is the kiss of death (assuming it does or would have become important). Maybe that's some universal force. Or maybe that's because anyone who feels the need to make those kinds of statements is actually showing us that they are desperate and insecure, otherwise they would just be showing us features and we'd grok how great the thing was.
While he was writing it, did Matz talk about how the language he was developing (Ruby , if you weren't aware) was going to be overwhelmingly popular? I'm guessing not (certainly there isn't any evidence of that).
Did the Beatles go around in 1962 talking about how their music would change the world? –No, they just made music they way they wanted to and it turned out to have a tremendous impact on music. It had that effect without them talking about how great they were.
My philosophy: Do something great, don't talk about it. Even if you think/hope/are convinced it will be great, just do it first. You can talk later about how you hoped it would be great, but talking about it first is lame. Having self-confidence is a positive, but talking about having self-confidence is lame.
"Never make forecasts, especially about the future. In no time, it will be a forgotten memory." - Samuel Goldwyn
Sorry for the non-technical post - but I just had to say this outloud somewhere. Nothing to see here - move along ;-)
