A few weeks ago, I attended the Philly Code Camp and I got a lot of good information about .Net 3.0 and what coming with the Visual Studio Orcas (.Net 3.5) release.

The main theme of the event was that all roads lead to Indigo (WCF). Starting with the release of .Net 3.5 Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) will be much more integrated with Windows Workflow (WF). The combination of these two technologies will greatly impact the next major releases of Share Point and BizTalk.

I highly suggest attending the next New Jersey or Philly code camps. I am sure there will be lots more information about the upcoming release of Visual Studio Orcas (.Net 3.5).

There is also a new Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the Philadelphia Area (Danilo Diaz Email: danilod@microsoft.com).

 General

Several speakers talked about how the industry is starting to move to Virtual PC’s for development. A couple of performance tips they had was to always use an external hard dive for storing VPC images and using a ready-boost flash drive under Windows Vista.

There were also several comments about the challenges of getting Visual Studio (Especially Orcas) and IIS 7.0 to run under Windows Vista. They recommend downloading the beta VPC image for Visual Studio Orcas instead of directly installing it under Windows Vista.

Microsoft Patterns & Practices

The Microsoft Patterns and Practices team is working on a new version of the Service Software Factory. The service factory promotes a contact first methodology, uses a layered design, and promotes the use of a number of patterns from the Martin Fowler (Enterprise Patterns & Enterprise Integration) and Eric Evans (Domain Driven Design) books. The next release will include more guidance for security and versioning and be more integrated into Visual Studio (Using the class designer to create data contracts).

 WCF&WF

Windows Workflow (WF) is an engine for doing workflow processing and a not a solution. It is up to the developer to provide the necessary components for building a complete solution. Currently there are a number of issues with WF; especially with the design of External Data Exchange and how to integrate with WCF. A work around to the issue is to directly access the WF Queues.

I did some research on this topic and came across some good information from Sam Gentile about the issues (1, 2, 3, 4) he has been facing with External Data Exchange. Along with a good overview (1, 2) from Tomas Restrepo of how to talk to WF Queues directly.

Visual Studio Orcas will include more integration between WCF and WF (WF Services). WCF end points will be used instead of External Data Exchange for host to workflow communications. Beyond the Visual Studio Orcas release there are a number of additional services that will be added to WCF and WF. Based on the research I did it looks like they are thinking about adding some of the features of BizTalk into WCF/WF namely adapters and data transformations.

 LINQ

Another major component of the next version of .Net (3.5) is language integrated query (LINQ). LINQ will allow developers to query in memory objects using a syntax similar to SQL (SELECT, FROM, WHERE, Etc…) When you use LINQ to query a collection it acts as a cursor or stream reader and returns a collection based on the filter you used. By default the collection return is not thread safe and contains pointers back to the elements of the collection you queried To get a snapshot (Copy) you must use the ToArray or ToList methods when querying the collection.

When Visual Studio Orcas is released it will include support for LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, LINQ to SQL, and LINQ to Datasets (In my book DataSets are evil and I like to see Microsoft depreciated it). LINQ to Entities (ADO Entity Framework) will not be included and possibly be released with the next version of SQL Server.

-- Todd S