March 2009 Entries

Microsoft P&P team releases VB support for Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (aka "Prism")

One of the places lacking good VB support was the Microsoft Patterns & Practices’ Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (formerly code-named "Prism"). The P&P team is now releasing VB versions of the QuickStarts, Hands-On Labs, and How-to Topics! Get all the good stuff here This download is provided to help Visual Basic .NET developers use the Composite Application Library. While Prism is not yet 100% VB, this is a big step in the right direction. The VB code was reviewed...
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Posted On Wednesday, March 25, 2009 10:37 AM | Feedback (1)

Deploying WCF Services to Azure

My past experience with WCF services has followed a slightly unusual path. For a variety of reasons, most of the services I've written have consisted of an interface and an implementation. Pretty straight-forward thus far. However, where it gets a little unusual is in the hosting mechanism. We're using Windows services to host of WCF services. This works out well for us, since these services live on intranets, and aren't publicly exposed. When looking at Azure, services are a little different. It's...
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Posted On Tuesday, March 10, 2009 4:22 PM | Feedback (2)

Craftsmanship vs Engineering

I've had a number of conversations lately where I argued that software development is much more akin to craftsmanship than to engineering. This usually leads to a lively discussion, especially in an informal context. Seems I'm not the only one thinking this way. Uncle Bob (Robert C Martin) posted a link to the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship. It'll be interesting to see what degree of impact this has on the development community...
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Posted On Monday, March 09, 2009 1:59 PM | Feedback (0)

Upcoming Azure Talks

I'll be presenting on Azure here in Fort Collins tonight, and again in Boulder on March 24th. The talks will focus on providing an introduction to Azure, including working through some of the common pain points (such as debugging). I will, of course, be posting tips and tricks here as I get them in a coherent format
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Posted On Monday, March 09, 2009 1:54 PM | Feedback (0)