Services and Workflows

WCF and WorkFlow go hand-in-hand: consequently, we've put together sessions for learning about them separately or utilizing them together. You'll learn how to use Cloud Computing Services, build WorkFlows that work with Sharepoint, build real-world systems with WorkFlows, and even create self-healing SOA Applications with WCF.

DT2Cloud Computing for .NET Developers
Michael S. Jones
Tuesday, December 9 – 9:45 a.m.
Cloud computing services are beginning to impact the developer community in a big way. Companies ranging from microISV startups to Fortune 500 companies are finding tremendous value in cloud-sourcing functions traditionally serviced by in-house facilities. Amazon's Simple Storage Service broke the ice with inexpensive large-scale reliable storage that catered to the development community. More recently, the Simple Queue Service, the Elastic Compute Cloud, and SimpleDB services have made possible what was too expensive to consider previously. The time has come to change the way we look at infrastructure - not only do we not need to build these services any longer, but we don't even need to manage them.

This session will start by exploring the possibilities to leverage cloud services available from Amazon. We will discuss how they are commonly being used, and how the services can best be adopted in your applications. Then we will spend the majority of our time exploring code to use each of these services inside your applications. We will discuss freely available tools and libraries that are available and how they can serve you best. Powerpoint will be kept to a minimum in favor of code and samples. You will leave this session with a solid understanding of how cloud computing services can help you build more robust applications more quickly and less expensively.

DT6 Bringing WCF and WF together using Workflow Services
Vishwas Lele
Tuesday, December 9 – 11:15 a.m.
This session will explore how WCF and WF can work together to support the concept of Workflow Services. After a very brief introduction to WF and WCF, we will take a detailed look at key scenarios enabled by Workflow Services including: better data exchange in and out of workflow, enforcing an application protocol on service methods and inheriting WF capabilities such as persistence into a WCF service.

DT18Using Windows Workflow Foundation to Build an Order Processing System
Robert Green
Tuesday, December 9 – 4:45 p.m.
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is part of the .NET Framework 3.5. It is a programming model, an engine and tools for building workflow into your applications. In this talk, you'll explore how to use WF in a real world application. How do you model an order processing system using a sequential or state machine workflow model? How do the host Windows or Web application and the workflow communicate? How does the workflow know to take the next step once a user has performed an action? Where does your business logic and data access code go? How do you integrate Web and WCF services? How do multiple users work with the same workflow? How do you manage long running workflows?

DW5Mixing WF and WCF
Miguel Castro
Wednesday, December 10 – 11:15 a.m.
.NET 3.5 introduced two new Workflow activities specifically designed to interact with WCF. Lacking in documentation a bit, these two activities are not exactly self-explanatory, but also not very complicated if you know how to use them. In this session, I'll show you how using the new Send & Receive activities in Workflow Foundation, you can both consume WCF services in a workflow, and expose a workflow as a WCF service; allowing your WCF services will benefit from all the great organization and code separation that WF offers.

DW7Building SharePoint Workflows with Visual Studio
Robert Green
Wednesday, December 10 – 11:15 a.m.
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is part of the .NET Framework 3.0 and above. It is a programming model, an engine and tools for building workflow into your applications. These applications can be client applications, Web applications and SharePoint applications. In this session, you will see how to create workflows and associate them with SharePoint lists and libraries. You'll see how to use the workflow activities and techniques you are already familiar with and also see how to use the SharePoint specific activities Visual Studio provides. You'll see how to deploy and debug SharePoint workflows using both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.

DTH6Mashups from the Ground Up
Josh Holmes
Thursday, December 11 – 9:45 a.m.
When building a Mashup, there are a lot of choices that come into play. Most people they with choosing the UI technologies that are going to be used, but they are wrong. They should be thinking about the information that is going to be used and how to get to that data. Mashups are about exposing new and interesting looks at data so the first thing that you have to do is figure out how to get to that data. Only after that do you start looking at the various front end technologies from AJAX to Silverlight to any number of other Rich Internet Platforms.

In this session, we will compare and contrast building out SOAP services verses REST services with ASMX, WCF and ADO.NET Data Services. We will demonstrate consuming those various services with AJAX, Live Maps, Silverlight and many more front end technologies.

DTH9Persistence Services and Windows Workflow Foundation
Ken Getz
Thursday, December 11 – 1:45 p.m.
Windows Workflow foundation provides a pluggable service model, making it easy to extend the standard behavior of a workflow. Microsoft provides an "in the box" service for persistence, and in this session, you'll learn how to use persistence services in order to both save and restore the state of a workflow at runtime. The built-in service uses SQL Server for storage, but they don't have to -- you'll also see how to get started creating your own persistence service.

DTH11POX/REST Strategies with WCF
Michiel van Otegem
Thursday, December 11 – 1:45 p.m.
WCF is a great technology to expose web services. Through configuration you can switch between various protocols. When it comes to supporting POX/REST message types however, WCF will not work out of the box. This session looks at the various strategies you can use with POX/REST messages and how to support these side-by-side with other protocols. Topics discussed include message processing, message signing, session management and authentication.

DTH18Understanding Transactions in WCF
Michiel van Otegem
Thursday, December 11 – 4:45 p.m.
Transactions play an important role in keeping our systems in a consistent state, making sure that combined operations all succeed or all fail. When working with (web) services, transactions are more complex than within a single AppDomain. Fortunately we have transactions support in WCF to help us manage this complexity. This sessions looks at how transactions work in WCF, the different transaction managers used by WCF in different scenario's, and of course how to use transactions in WCF.