Back at the beginning of the year I wrote a blog post about the awkward conflict that BizTalk faced now that WF was on the scene.  Although at the time of writing there was an obvious cross over between the products, BizTalk still offered a number of key advantages over bog standard workflow. Due to some emails I received I decided to look around Microsoft's code projects and see what I could find. It was way back in Feb that I came across OSLO.

9 Months later and with PDC out of the way, OSLO and Microsofts strategy for WF is far more clear. OSLO seemed to evolve over the last few months into the codename primarily used for the modelling language and toolset announced. Microsoft also showed off a whole new version of WF for .NET 4.0. This new version of WF comes with some major improvements.

• WF has been rewritten from the ground up.
• Performance has been dramatically increased
• Services and Workflow can be written purely with XAML
• A new customisable designer surface
• Large number of new activities for developing workflows
• Seamless integration with WCF

So with WF being upgraded to a spanky new version which offers a wealth of new features please bare in mind that BizTalk'ers are still waiting for their orchestration engine to be updated to use the new WF engine. Given the new version of WF being announced I would be wondering how long its going to take before I see that in BizTalk?

Back to the original OSLO article I found way back in Februrary, the article talked of a new WF hosting engine. This part of the puzzle we now know has been codenamed "Dublin". If you haven't heard of Dublin yet and your into BizTalk then hold your breath as the diagram below (taken from MSDN) may look familiar.

 Dublin is the application server that has long been missing from the Microsoft product set. Announced to be a part of Windows Server , Dublin provides a runtime which hosts WF workflows and provides services for persistence, tracking, management, message forwarding and much more. The Dublin runtime is implemented on SQL Server server which allows WF developers to create long running workflows. Prior to Dublin this was only possible by either rolling your own or implementing BizTalk.

Is this sounding familiar to you? Well it doesn't stop there I'm afraid. Dublin can also run as part of farm of servers whereby each instance  can use a single shared persistence store. Dublin also provides automatic workflow activation as part of its message routing architecture.

As you can see Dublin is the future. Even Microsoft recognise the awkward overlap of features as evidenced by this MSDN article.

For anybody familiar with BizTalk Server, looking at “Dublin” might cause a slight sense of déjà vu. Supporting workflow-based logic, providing a monitoring and management infrastructure: These are things that BizTalk Server does today. What’s the future of BizTalk Server in a “Dublin” world?

The key thing to understand is that “Dublin” doesn’t directly target traditional BizTalk scenarios. For example, enterprise application integration and business-to-business connections via EDI will still use BizTalk Server. Similarly, bringing existing applications into the service-oriented world by exposing their functions and/or data through BizTalk Server will continue to make sense. While the reach of “Dublin” may grow over time, BizTalk Server r ...

Scott Gu has a post today highlighting a couple of features that we can expect to see in Silverlight 3. Good to hear on the list are the following

• Increased databinding support (Lets hope we get element binding)
• 3D graphics support (With GPU Acceleration)
• H.264 Codecs for high quality video streams.

His full post can be found here. 

If you didn't manage to make it to the Silverlight UK user group last week then you may want to check out this video below. This is session one by TrickyBusiness who outline there design approach. Enjoy.

An interesting post has arrived on the Ado.net team blog with regard to the future of LINQ to SQL. Although not coming outright and saying it, it seems that LINQ to SQL is likely to be deprecated in the future in favour of Entity Framework. 

“We’re making significant investments in the Entity Framework such that as of .NET 4.0 the Entity Framework will be our recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios”

So this leaves the question, what will customers who have implemented LINQ to SQL do for long term support. I would like to see Microsoft provide clear guidelines and tooling in order to help those unfortunate ones migrate their existing software forward. The good news is that the awkward gap between LINQ to SQL and EntityFramework now seems to have been resolved.

For those of you coming from WPF to Silverlight you often find yourself frustrated when you find that Silverlight is lacking some very useful controls that you take for granted. Well today at least that gap is narrowing..... As here you will find on codeplex the Silverlight Toolkit. http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight

With this release you get additional layout controls such as Dockpanel, ViewBox, Wrap panels etc as well as some more advance controls such as expanders and charting!

I heard a while back these would becoming as an additional download so glad to see them finally arrive. Expect ALOT more in the near future!

Well there are announcements coming left right and center from PDC this year. We've heard about Azure and Microsoft's move to provide cloud services. We hear details of Oslo and Dublin and what they will mean for the future of language developement and modelling.

And then one very important announcment from Microsoft which shows their commitment to Silverlight and related technologies is the announcement that the next version of Office will come with a web enabled version powered by Silverlight. Their is a video posted on Channel 9 about this that shows small demos of Silverlight Word, Excel and One Note. VERY COOL!

This is the future of RIA's and software as a service and I am looking forward to see how Microsoft's competitors continue to compete now that Silverlight and .Net are going cross platform.

Well after 8 years Microsoft has decided to update the .NET Logo. I always like the old one but I think the new one is even better.

I've read in the blogs that this new logo is already in place around PDC. One thing about this logo is that it brings a feeling of familiarity and I'm not sure why. Perhaps its because it uses similar colours and gradients as those found in Photoshop CS3?

Well its official, Silverlight 2 is now complete and available to the public. The full press statement can be read here.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-13Silverlight2PR.mspx

The total download size weighs in at 4.64Mb so still pretty compact. Hats of to Microsoft for squeezing so much functionality in!

Highlights of new Silverlight 2 features include the following:

• .NET Framework support with a rich base class library. This is a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework.
 
• Powerful built-in controls. These include DataGrid, ListBox, Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar controls and more.
 
• Advanced skinning and templating support. This makes it easy to customize the look and feel of an application.
 
• Deep zoom. This enables unparalleled interactivity and navigation of ultrahigh resolution imagery.
 
• Comprehensive networking support. Out-of-the-box support allows calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS and standard HTTP services, enabling users to create applications that easily integrate with existing back-end systems.
 
• Expanded .NET Framework language support. Unlike other runtimes, Silverlight 2 supports a variety of programming languages, including Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby, making it easier for developers already familiar with one of these languages to repurpose their existing skill sets.
 
• Advanced content protection. This now includes Silverlight DRM, powered by PlayReady, offering robust content protection for connected Silverlight experiences.
 
• Improved server scalability and expanded advertiser support. This includes new streaming and progressive download capabilities, superior search engine optimization techniques, and next-generation in-stream advertising support.
 
• Vibrant partner ecosystem. Visual Studio Industry Partners such as ComponentOne LLC, Infragistics Inc. and Telerik Inc. are providing products that further enhance developer capabilities when creating Silverlight applications using Visual Studio.
 
• Cross-platform and cross-browser support. This includes support for Mac, Windows and Linux in Firefox, Safari and Windows Internet Explorer.
 

My good friend Andrew Clancy at Conchango has written an interesting blog post about the benefits of using the NHibernate Query Generator. We have been actively using this in our project and we find benefits every day. Check it out.

Blog post here

Scott demonstrating ASP.net MVC

Well Remix is over and my thoughts post event was that it was a bit of let down. Unfortunately PDC is right around the corner and as a result no new major announcements were being made. Before attending I made a promise to myself to mix equally between design and development orientated sessions.

While there I got to speak to some great people and discuss topics ranging from visualisation techniques to the duplex communication in Silverlight. I was also lucky enough to grab a few moments of Scott Gu’s time and discuss a few Silverlight specifics. 

• No MergeDictionaries for RTM - I was mortified to hear that MergeDictionaries is not going to make it into the RTM. I cannot believe that we have to specify all our styles and resources in our App.xaml for the foreseeable future.  This is particularly annoying if you are trying to migrate a WPF app to Silverlight.

• H264 will miss RTM – I kind of expected this one as it was only recently announced. But Scott clarified it.

• Charting controls coming – It looks like the Silverlight team are working hard on more advanced controls and Scott let slip that charting controls are to be included.

• Silverlight automatic update – In one of Scott’s sessions he confirmed that Silver light 2 Beta 2 installs will automatically upgrade to the RTM.

• Ribbon bar for WPF on track – It looks like the Ribbon for WPF should be due sometime this year. I asked if we can expect to see this in Silverlight soon and he confirmed it was NOT on the current development schedule. (Damn).

• Silverlight not the preferred platform – I asked Scott if I could expect to see innovation happening in the Silverlight space from now on given that the VSM was developed for Silverlight first. Scott said there was no particular decision on which came first, however they will be trying and reduce the issue of code portability between WPF and Silverlight apps.

• And Finally - 3D was pretty much confirmed. When asked by a member of the audience when will we see 3D support in Silverlight Scott’s grin couldn’t be hidden. He kept saying “Well that would be a compelling option”. I’m expecting to see this announced at PDC.

So generally I had a good couple of days but felt some of the session’s could have been a little more tech and less big picture. Next year perhaps.

I was surfing the web this morning and I came across this impressive Office Ribbon bar implementation by Simon Matthews at Infusion. He has uploaded a demo of the control and at it is mightly impressive.

I will be following his work eagerly as its something so far I think Microsoft has failed to deliver to developers. Why they have not delivered these controls I am not clear, but my hunch is that they are trying to capitalise on the uniqueness of the ribbon bar in office before they allow the rest of us the goodness. Eitherway, great job Simon.

Mark Mann form Conchango has posted some info on the agenda for the Silverlight UK user group on the 14th August. Unfortuantely I am out of country when this one is on. Gutted.  But you can find out some more information here.

http://blogs.conchango.com/markmann/archive/2008/08/01/silverlight-uk-user-group-2-agenda-announced.aspx

and here

http://blogs.conchango.com/michelleflynn/archive/2008/08/01/silverlight-agenda-announced.aspx

The application I am working on at the moment has a large number of complex search screens that allow the user to define either very narrow or very broad query's. A great deal of effort has been spent in optimising the queries in order to ensure they are performant. However, if a user decided to execute a very broad query, the result set that could be returned could be many thousands of records. Let’s take a look at a broad query using this simple SQL.

In this query we want to return everything from our person table where the surname contains the letter “DA”. Running this query gives us the following 99 results. I’ve randomized the data in our person data for privacy reasons.

Now this query is running on some test data but on a live system it might return 20,000+ records. Transferring this data from our DB server to our application tier, then into business entities and serialising them via soap to our client is going to be demanding process. This is not going to be a particulary great idea, a better approach would be to return results in pages so that we can maintain a responsive UI and reduced long running network calls.

Taking this example further, we lets say that we would like our page sizes to be 5 records each. The first page will return record 1-5 and when the user clicks next we require records 6-10 to be displayed. In order for us to be able to achieve this functionality we need to implement an index on our result set so that we can locate a particular page of data within the full results. To do this SQL server provides a handy function called  which ROW_NUMBER()provides an incremental index for each record in our result set. If we implement the  ROW_NUMBER()as part of our results we can see the results below.

We can now see from executed query above that our results contain and INDEX column which uniquely identifies each row returned from our results. By adding this index to our results we now have a way of navigating batches of records within our results set.  To do this is not as simple as just adding a WHERE to our SQL statement, instead we must execute the full que ...