I'm excited to be teaching the first BizTalk double feature class coming up October in Irvine.  Now I know what you are thinking: "of course you are happy to get out of Minnesota and go to sunny California", but I actually like fall in MN. No , this class is going to be cool because it allows me to cover all of BizTalk Server 2006 R2.  A normal class just doesn't give me the time to cover the core BizTalk messaging engine, orchestration, rules, etc. AND RFID, EDI, and WCF adapters.  So having the double feature is great because students new to BizTalk development will get the whole package in one week.  So if you want to learn BizTalk, come join me in CA for a very full week of BizTalk content.

For those of you who attended my webcast today on workflow communications, the demo code is attached to this post. It includes the base activities used for communication activities (more on these in a later post) and it provides simple example of local communications and web services. The two-way communication activity and sample is also included. 

If you are interested in the webcast check here in the next day to two for the OnDemand link.

Enjoy!

I've got a couple of fun talks coming up this month.  First, I'm going to be doing an MSDN webcast on Windows Workflow Foundation - Communication in Depth.  I'm going to dive into the core communication architecture, discuss how some of the OOB activities use it, and how you can build your own activities to take advantage of it.  We'll cover one way communication between the host and the workflow, but we'll also look at how to do two-way communication to get a response back from the workflow. 

The talk information can be found at this link:

Windows Workflow Communication in Depth

This talk is also part of a series where you can find other talks from my friends Jon Flanders and Jesus Rodriguez on other .NET 3.5 topics.  The link for the series is here:

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnnetframework35.aspx?tab=webcasts&id=liveall

I'm also doing a local talk this month at the Microsoft office if you are in the Minneapolis area.  I'll be talking about building connected systems with WF and WCF for developers and architects.  This will be a good talk if you are interested in these technologies and want to learn more about how to use them to build real applications. 

Event information and registration

I had a great time at Tech Ed and I'm looking forward to the conferences coming up this fall (Minnesota Developers Conference where I'll be doing talks on LINQ and ADO.NET Data Services and Heartland Developers Conference where I'll be talking about BizTalk Services and the "Internet Service Bus"). 

Thanks to everyone who came to my session on port binding options in BizTalk Server yesterday.  You can find the demos here including the visual studio solution, binding files for BizTalk and the PowerShell script I used for setting up and running my demos. 

Microsoft has rolled out the beta of SP1 for .NET Framework version 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008.  Now don't get confused, this is not just a simple set of bug fixes, this thing is big! 

• Entity Framework and LINQ to entities
• ADO.NET Data Services (formerly project "Astoria")
• Dynamic data web sites (highly RAD data driven web sites)
• Performance improvements across the board (WCF, WPF, AJAX, debugging, etc.)
• New client profile (not quite the slimmed down CLR of silverlight, but gives you a smaller footprint without server technologies you don't need).  Now, if they could do the opposite and remove the Windows UI stuff so I could run Windows Server 2008 Server Core with IIS and ASP.NET. 
• a bunch of perf and usability improvements in VS 2008

I think the Entity stuff, plus the Dynamic data and data services is a killer combination for many web site developers to get their data modeled and quickly expose an admin tool for data maintenance  and service endpoints for interaction. 

Check out Soma's blog for some high level details and download links:Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 SP1 Beta available now

Scott Gu has details on many of the new features in the IDE and framework: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/05/12/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-service-pack-1-beta.aspx

Brian Harry has the details on the TFS improvements in the SP: Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 Preview

A metric b*#&load of enhancements for a service pack - awesome job folks, I can't wait for the released bits this summer. 

I've been teaching mostly WF and WCF lately, so I'm excited that in a couple of weeks (April 22) I'll be getting a chance to teach our core BizTalk course again in the lovely city of Chicago.  I'm excited because there is a lot of cool stuff for this particular open enrollment. 

1) R2 - need I say more? I will.  We will be using the latest bits to teach the core course from now on so you'll be learning BizTalk Server fundamentals using the latest and greatest version.  This is still a class for developers new to BizTalk, so if you have taken this class, you might be interested in the R2 features class that Jon is teaching in May and August. 

2) Dual Monitors!  Our crack sales team has negotiated dual monitors from the hardware vendor so you'll be able to see the lab manual and Visual Studio each in full screen glory!

3) It's in downtown Chicago right on Wacker Drive near all sorts of cool stuff for the evenings.

4) It's BizTalk and we'll cover all the three letter acronyms (TLA) BRE, BAM, WCF,WSE,ASMX (ok that's four letters), CSV, HAT, PUB (actually a technical term, but maybe where we'll be in the evenings as well), SUB, EAI, ESB, SOA.  I could go on, but you get the picture. 

5) As if all the above are not enough, we have some seats available and the course is in a week and half, so the sales guys are "ready to deal".  Actually, their just ready to cut you some discounts :) , especially if you sign up two or three people together, but even if you are just signing up one developer.  Talk to our fabulous sales team to get more information or register with a discount.  Just tell them you read about it on my blog. 

Hope to see you there, and once I get back from the class, I promise some more technical content.  I've been working on some demos and samples that I'll be posting over the next couple of months. 

Last week I had the pleasure of teaching a class for Healthwise in Boise, and while there met David Starr.  David has a website called Elegant Code and we got a chance to sit down for a podcast during the week.  We chatted about WF, WCF, BizTalk, "Oslo" and being a Pluralsight instructor.  Have a listen if you are interested, and check out the rest of the site while you are there. 

David also organized the Boise Code Camp, which I, sadly, missed by just a day.  From the sound of it, this was a huge success and a pretty large event, even by west coast standards.  I'm sorry I missed it.

I recently got to sit down with some local smart guys here in Minneapolis and we chatted about REST versus SOA.  It wasn't any kind of religious discussion, but it was fun to talk to people who build apps and work with developers every day to hear what they think about this topic. 

You can find the audio over on Jeff Brand's blog.  Enjoy!

We do these periodically and are looking for other folks that might be interested in joining, so if you live in the area, contact Jeff through his blog and let him know. 

Several people are starting to blog about the introduction of the Volta project on live.labs.com.  This is a pretty interesting research project and points to an interesting development at Microsoft.  I get a little frustrated at times b/c I hear developers complain that a) Microsoft isn't agile enough and it takes them too long to release stuff, and b) there is too much stuff coming out of Microsoft for me to keep up.  Well which is it!

The stuff on live labs is really early stuff that is only interesting if you want to see what Microsoft is thinking about long term and provide feedback.  If you are going to get frustrated when you can't use this stuff in 6 months in production, then it is not for you.  That being said, looking at the list of projects out there, two really stick out for me: Volta and Deep Fish.  Volta is a really intesting project to me in that it potentially allows me to write client code once and have the framework take advantage of the richest platform on the client.  I think that is where it really shines, where I can create the UI and it will use Ajax on clients that don't have .NET, and use something richer like Silverlight 2.0 when it is there.  I think that is more compelling than figuring out architecture/deployment later on.  I watched a Channel 9 video a this summer about Volta: check out part 1 and part 2 to hear more about the ideas from

Jeff was just complaining about the fact that IE mobile has not evolved.  I look at the Deepfish project and it gives me hope that someday my Windows Mobile device will have a browser half as cool as the one on the IPhone. 

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of participating in a roundtable event with some really smart folks from around the Minneapolis area.  Jeff Brand, our local evangelist and .NET sex symbol (self-proclaimed) organized the whole thing and recorded it using a very cool device from Microsoft that came out of their research group.  It is a panning video camera that can react to the voices and capture video of the person speaking.  I think Jeff had some problems getting it working just how he wanted, but it is still pretty cool stuff and I'm sure we'll get it ironed out for future chats. 

Jeff has some posts with the links to download the conversation if you are interested.  Unfortunately, I was in NC at the time teaching a class so I had to participate via phone and Live Meeting.  While it gave me a remote user look at the experience with the Roundtable device, it was less than optimal way to be an active participant in the conversation.  I'm looking forward to the next conversation when I can hopefully be in town.