My lovely wife Shannon is helping to do proof-reading on my book, and today she was working on the preface.

One of the things I talk about in the preface is about Roy Fielding, and how his dissertationis really a named codification of the architecture of the Web

She said to me "This really bugs me, why does someone get credit for just naming and distilling something that already exists"

I replied with "Well - naming things is important and he was part of the effort to create the thing (the Web) so he should get some of the credit"

She said "Hmm - I still don't get it, can you give me an example from outside of the world of technology"

I said "Imagine when bebop was being created as a genre of music. Think about Dizzy Gillespie, imagine he wrote a paper in about 1950 describing bebop, how it worked, and what went into creating it, and how to tell bebop from other forms of jazz based on chord structures, etc."

That made sense to her, so I thought I would blog about it. :-)

I'm going to also start some linking to other blogs, which in the past I've kind of stayed away from.

This video was shot at TechEd US 2008 - they just sent me this URI this week - Click to watch the video

Guess I am catching up on things to posts :)

I love the San Gabriel .NET user group - mostly because its so close to home!

I'll be speaking on my newest favorite subject - REST!  on August 20th - details here http://www.sgvdotnet.org/

Hope to see LA locals there :)

Had a great week!  Thanks to all that attended.  Here is the source code for demos are promised.

Another user group talk for me - this time in Sweden!    Here is the info (in Swedish)

http://biztalkusergroup.se/blogs/info/archive/2008/08/06/n-228-sta-tr-228-ff-den-4-e-september-med-jon-flanders.aspx

See you there!

Thanks to everyone who attended.  Here are the slides -

rest.pdf (491.81 KB)

And the demos -

Just finished the main writing stage for the REST book.  Wow books are hard (people ask me all the time why I dont' write a book on BizTalk and or WF and sometimes I forget why - books are hard).

Next week I'm teaching the R2 course for Pluralsight in NY.  Should be fun.  Sam will be sitting in, so that should add some color to the course ;-).

Also, Monday night I'm doing a talk at the NY Connected Systems User Group.  Come by if you are in the area. 

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.

My Workflow Sample Page

My BizTalk Sample Page

Mostly this post is here to motivate me to actually get this book done ASAP -

http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-NET-Jon-Flanders/dp/0596519206/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214538175&sr=1-2 

Yes - I am writing a book on WCF and REST.  Not a big suprise ;-)

still going on

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 ;-))