Gold Coast

Starting today, I will be moving my blog.  This may be a little confusing, so bear with me.  To be clear, http://devkeydet.com (which redirects to http://devkeydet.spaces.live.com) will still be my official browser based web presence.  I will still use Windows Live Spaces for everything but blogging.  This means that any URLs I have sent/published on http://devkeydet.spaces.live.com will continue to work.  I will turn off syndication of my old blog (http://devkeydet.spaces.live.com/blog/) one week from today.  All new blog posts after this one will be syndicated via http://feeds.feedburner.com/devkeydet.  If you want to continue to get my posts in your RSS reader, please subscribe to this feed as soon as possible.

The reason I am doing this is because I need richer metrics about who is viewing my blog.  Windows Live Spaces only gives you Total page views, Page views today, Page views this week, and Page views within the last hour.  Many of my fellow Microsoft blogger's get much richer information through FeedBurner and our new analytics tool code named Gatineau.  I am not aware of any way to get either of these working with the Spaces blogging engine.  I know it is a web "no-no" to change your blog.  I really don't want to put people through the pain of having to subscribe to a new feed, but I need better metrics about my blog.  I sincerely apologize for the switcheroo.

The page that loads when you hit http://devkeydet.com or http://devkeydet.spaces.live.com will continue to surface archived content from my old blog as well as give you access to my new blog.

If you are reading this from http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector, then you don't have to change anything.  You are covered because my personal blog is "aggregated" to http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector.

Quite a few questions came up about WPF at our last two Public Sector Developer Conferences in Seattle & Olympia, WA.  I forgot to let people know that I am keeping a WPF Resources list on my Windows Live Space.  I just added a link to a helpful blog post from the WPF Performance blog titled Improving WPF applications startup time. 

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) were released in 2006 as part of the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 with separate extensions for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. These tools were improved on and are now integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and enhanced in the .NET Framework 3.5.  This session demonstrates the top new features in Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 for WF and WCF. This is a demo heavy session, so do not expect many slides.

Topics will include:

• Enhanced tooling for WCF
• REST/Web Programming, Syndication (RSS/ATOM), and AJAX (JSON) with WCF
• Workflow Services (exposing a Workflow as a WCF Service / Calling WCF services from a workflow)
• SharePoint Workflows

A basic understanding of WCF (http://msdn.microsoft.com/wcf) & WF (http://msdn.microsoft.com/wf) is a prerequisite for this session.

When

January 30th 2:00P-3:30P EST (11:00A-12:30P PST)

Register at this link:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032363513&Culture=en-US

Note: Audio will be via the Internet.  Your machine will need a speaker.

Thanks to everyone who attended.  You can get the deck here and the code here.  The code has been updated for Visual Studio 2008 RTM.

Thanks to everyone who attended.  All of my demos are based on Visual Studio 2008 / .NET Framework 3.5 RTM.  Here are the downloads:

Introduction to LINQ + LINQ to SQL - deck, demo code

NOTE: You will need to install both the Northwind (available here) and AdventureWorks (available here) sample databases for the LINQ to SQL demos to work.  You may need to change connection strings based on you individual dev environment.

What's New in WCF and WF in Visual Studio 2008 & the .NET Framework 3.5 - deck, demo code

NOTE: The SharePoint workflow demo is a walkthrough of the Hands On Lab (HOL) from the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit (available here).  You will definitely want to check out the kit.  It is chock full of FREE TRAINING in the form of slide decks and HOLs.  BONUS: Recordings of the individual training kit sessions are available on channel9 here.

I was unable to answer a few questions that came up during the conferences.  In Seattle, I tried to jot some of them down.  Unfortunately, I forgot to save the questions in notepad:(.  In Olympia, I just asked people to email me.  Please feel free to email me your questions.  I will hunt down answers and post in the next few days.  Thanks!

SHAMELESS PLUG: Don't forget about my What's New for Web Developers in Visual Studio 2008 & the .NET Framework 3.5 webcast today:).