Some time ago, my buddy Jesse posted about his new favorite utility.

As a matter of policy, we record How-Do-I videos while doing the programming in VB and than I have to re-write the sample code in C#.

So, automatic code conversion was really interesting to me.

So - I got the VB to C# and the C# to VB Converters from Tangible Software Solutions.

$179 for one language or $299 for both.

My thoughts.....

WOW !

They work great and will save me TONS of time!

Thanks Tangible !

[ Click HERE to visit Tangible Software Solutions]

WUX315 - PHP on Windows: Not an Oxymoron!
Session Day/Time: 6/6/2008 10:15AM-11:30AM
Room: S230 A

Is it a well kept secret? From Microsoft Internet Information Services, to AJAX, to Microsoft .NET, Windows is a viable platform for your existing PHP based applications. In this session, see how to configure PHP on Windows for performance and reliability and how you can take PHP applications to the next level by leveraging .NET and Windows.

WUX314 - AJAX Programming with the Microsoft AJAX Technologies
Session Day/Time: 6/5/2008 4:30PM-5:45PM
Room: S320 C

Microsoft AJAX Developer technologies are a collection of offerings that make AJAX programming slick and productive, but have you wrapped your head around all the pieces? This session provides a soup-to-nuts explanation of the Microsoft AJAX Technology Stack and demonstrates how to use Microsoft Visual Studio for AJAX, The ASP.NET Extension for AJAX, The AJAX Control Toolkit, and non-Microsoft third-party AJAX Libraries to develop true RIAs.

:) If this looks familiar, it's because a prematurely posted about this last week. (And I wasn't supposed to.)

Well, NOW I can tell you WHERE to get it !

Here is the announcement ..........

The Visual Studio & .NET Framework evangelism team released a revision of the .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit, updated to work with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 & .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta 1! The April Preview of the training kit has been downloaded over 13,000 times. The May Preview release includes updated hands-on-labs as well as new presentations.

The following features had their labs updated in this iteration:

· ASP.NET AJAX History

· ASP.NET MVC

· ASP.NET Dynamic Data

· ADO.NET Data Services

· ADO.NET Entity Framework

Due to the incompatibility between Visual Studio 2008 SP1 beta 1 and the Silverlight 2 SDK beta 1 release, the ASP.NET Silverlight controls lab that was available in the initial release of the kit, won’t be available in the May preview.

The following features have supporting presentations included in this iteration:

· ASP.NET MVC

· ASP.NET Dynamic Data

· ADO.NET Data Services

New presentations will continue to be developed for inclusion in future iterations. In addition, demo scripts for each presentation will be created and added to the kit.

· You can download the Visual Studio 2008 & .NET 3.5 SP1 beta releases here.

· You can download the training kit here.

If you are an avid reader, like I am, then you know that different publishers tend to have different styles and specialties.

Murach is unique. They don't publish TONS of books, but the ones they do publish fill an interesting space.

Take this one......

I first read the 2005 version of both the C# and the VB books and loved them. I said then, and say again, if I were to teach a VB or C# book I would use these as text books. They are complete, but pleasant to read (unlike lots of textbooks.)

Murach has updated this book to include the 2008 topics.

I dug into to recently because I was doing some interesting things with Microsoft new Dynamic Data technology which makes much use of Partial Classes. It's fully up to date with the 2008 stuff !

Click on the book link to check it out at Amazon.

Say hello to Alice. [ More info here. ]

From their web site......

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

With more code to write than time to write it, I'm a huge fan of anything that helps me code.

Someone recently sent me a link to Home Tomato's Visual AssistX for Visual Studio.

This is a great example of how the 3rd party ecosystem makes the .NET platform great for developers.

I'd type a list of features here but the list is HUGE.

Instead, check it out here http://www.wholetomato.com/products/default.asp

Personal Licence is $99

Some time ago I posted a list of links to Windows Workflow Foundation Tutorials and since then I've been getting an increasing number of requests for a list of links to WCF tutorials.

So, here you go!  Sixty Five Videos and Virtual Labs to make you a WCF Expert !

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 01 of 15): Overview

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 02 of 15): Contracts 

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 03 of 15): Contract Versioning

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 04 of 15): Exceptions and Faults

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 05 of 15): Bindings

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 06 of 15): Hosting

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 07 of 15): Messaging Patterns

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 08 of 15): Instancing Modes

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 09 of 15): Concurrency, Throughput, and Throttling

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 10 of 15): Security Fundamentals

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 11 of 15): Federated Security

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 12 of 15): Reliable Messaging

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 13 of 15): Transactions

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 14 of 15): Message Queuing

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 15 of 15): Extensibility

Programming the Windows Communication Foundation

The Lifetime of a Message in Windows Communication Foundation

A Sneak Preview of Windows Communication Foundation from an Early Adopter's Perspective

Management and Diagnostics for Windows Communication Foundation

Load Balancing, Deployment, and Performance for Windows Communication Foundation

Taking Advantage of TCP/IP Reliability in SOAP

MSDN Webcast: Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation

MSDN Webcast: Windows Communication Foundation

MSDN Webcast: In-Depth Answers to Your Questions About Windows Communication Foundation

Calling Windows Communication Foundation Services with ASP.NET AJAX Client Libraries (Part 1 of 2)

Calling Windows Communication Foundation Services with ASP.NET AJAX Client Libraries (Part 2 of 2)

 MSDN Webcast: Advanced Serialization

MSDN Webcast: Building Distributed Applications with Windows Communication Foundation 

MSDN Webcast: Building Connected Systems Using Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation

Exposing Your Content as a Service Using Windows Communication Foundation

Building Powerful AJAX-Style Solutions with ASP.NET "Atlas" and Windows Communication Foundation

Extending Windows Communication Foundation

Working with Windows Communication Foundation

Windows Communication Foundation Web-Centric Capabilities in .NET Framework 3.5

Working with Operations and Calls in Windows Communication Foundation

Introducing Web Services Enhancements for Microsoft .NET (WSE) 3.0

Dissecting Contract-First Web Services

Live From Redmond: VB9 – Building Service-Oriented Applications with WCF

Migrating .NET Applications to Services Oriented Solutions with WCF

Writing Custom Channels for Windows Communication Foundation

Transactions in Distributed Solutions with Windows Communication Foundation

.NET 3.0 Series: Windows Communication Framework Overview

Transactions in Distributed Solutions with Windows Communication Foundation

Building Powerful AJAX-Style Solutions with ASP.NET "Atlas" and Windows Communication Foundation

Exposing Your Content as a Service Using Windows Communication Foundation

Web Services Interoperability with Java and J2EE Using Windows Communication Foundation ("Indigo")

Understanding Windows Communication Foundation Contracts

Building Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation Applications with Microsoft Visual Studio Codename "Orcas"

Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and "InfoCard" in the Public Sector

Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Identity in Financial Services

The Web Service Software Factory Using WCF

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) with Justin Smith

Building Workflow-Enabled Services with Windows Communication Foundation

A Sneak Preview of Windows Communication Foundation from an Early Adopter's Perspective

Live from PDC: A Guided Tour of "Indigo

Connecting Windows Workflow Foundations to Lotus Notes/Lotus Domino

Virtual Labs

Understanding Windows Communication Foundation Virtual Lab

Reliable and Transacted Messaging with the Windows Communication Foundation

A Server Scenario Lab with Windows Communication Foundation

WCF Introduction - Building a WCF Service

The Fundamentals of Programming the Windows Communication Foundation

Building a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Adapter using the WCF LOB Adapter SDK

Understanding Windows Communication Foundation Virtual Lab express

Links

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa663324.aspx

Also, Check out the WCF Security Guide !

http://www.codeplex.com/WCFSecurityGuide

We're Web Developers.... But there is still a place for rich client apps.

recently we published a "Syndicated Client Starter Kit" over on www.WindowsClient.net (my team owns that site too. )

In the showcase for that starter kit there is an AWESOME MSDN Reader application.

ITS FREE - Install it !

http://windowsclient.net/wpf/starter-kits/sce.aspx

I've had a couple of emails recently from ASP.NET developers asking about how to get a jump start on learning Windows Workflow Foundation.

So, I dug up this list of links to a seven part Webcast Series on the subject.

Have fun !

Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 1 of 7): Workflow in Windows Applications (Level 100)

Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 2 of 7): Simple Human Workflow Using E-mail (Level 200)

Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 3 of 7): Hosting and Communications Options in Workflow Scenarios (Level 300)

Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 4 of 7): Workflow, Messaging, and Services: Developing Distributed Applications with Workflows (Level 300)

Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 5 of 7): Developing Event Driven State Machine Workflows (Level 300)

Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 6 of 7): Extending Workflow Capabilities with Custom Activities (Level 300)

Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 7 of 7): Developing Rules Driven Workflows (Level 300)

UPDATE: Check our these two great articles by Igor.

Part 1: How to define an SMTP protocol state machine in a Workflow

part 2: Marrying PowerShell into Workflows (Part 1 of 4)

Visual Studio® 2008 Web Deployment Projects - Released

Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects provide additional functionality to build and deploy Web sites and Web applications in Visual Studio 2008. This add-in provides a comprehensive UI to manage build configurations, merging, and using pre-build and post-build tasks with MSBuild.

Get Visual Studio® 2008 Web Deployment Projects HERE.

Read ScottGu's Post about Visual Studio® 2008 Web Deployment Projects HERE.

Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office system (version 3.0 Runtime) - Released

This download (VSTOR30.exe) installs the Visual Studio Tools for the Office system 3.0 Runtime, which is required to run VSTO solutions for the 2007 Microsoft Office system built using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

Get VSTO HERE.