29. September 2011
ZeroKoll
Azure , WCF
My last post was a bit light on the coding side I know. I also know that I promised to make up for that with a post with some actual code. And this is it! Actually, this is one of them. My plan is to walk through several of the features over the next few posts in the n00b kind of way.
That is, I am going to go through the basics for each of the features I deem interesting, making it easy to follow for people who are new to the Service Bus. And please don’t be offended by the “n00b” comment. We are all “n00bs” at some point in every thing we do.
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Ok, after yesterdays less technical post, I guess it is time to get back to writing a real techy post. This time, it is even techy, or geeky, enough to be about Silverlight 5, which currently is still in beta.
This obviously means that we can’t use it, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t have a look at some of the new features and start thinking about how we can upgrade our existing applications as soon as the new version is released…
Custom type providers might sound really obscure, and to be honest, not very interesting. But that’s where you are wrong…
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Ok, so in my last post, I gave a brief introduction to WCF for the complete n00b. As a follow up to this, I would like to have a look at some different ways to consume these services.
The “normal” way to do it is obviously by adding a service reference to the project in VS, but there are alternatives that can make sense.
The samples I am going to use are specifically for Silverlight as they focus on simple bindings and features that Silverlight supports, but it can still be used for any .NET client.
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Ok…So I am more of a general .NET and Silverlight developer, but it is hard to get around the fact that WCF infiltrates most of the projects I ever work on. And after having read a substantial part of Juval Löwy’s book about WCF, I have realized that there was a lot that I didn’t know and didn’t fully understand. Not that I am saying that I get it all now, but I have a better understanding at least.
The thing is that WCF isn’t really very hard in most cases, but having a basic understanding makes it a lot easier. And to be honest, the basics will take you a long way when working with Silverlight, since Silverlight doesn’t support a lot of the more advanced features. To be honest, the WCF support in Silverlight is fairly basic, but it is enough…
So based on this, I thought I would try and write a down to earth and simple introduction to the main concepts in WCF.
Ok, so this post is definitely going down in the books as “why would you do that” for a lot of people, but it actually has its benefits in some cases. What I want to show, is how we can work with WCF services and service interfaces without having to add a service reference to Visual Studio and instead auto generate the required code using T4 templates…
So why would I want to do that? Well, in some cases it is kind of tedious and even complicated to spin up the service just to be able to update the service reference and in some cases it isn’t even possible to get access to the WSDL that is required to create it. And in those cases, this will help you… In my case, the services and service contracts are built by one dev, and the Silverlight stuff by me. To us, this way of working makes it a lot easier to handle changes to the service contracts as we go along… I can get changes by just checking out the changed interfaces without having to try and get my solution into a state where I can update my service reference.
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A week or so ago, I got a call from a client who had some issues with an application that I had built. The application is a WPF 4 “media player” that is supposed to runs 24/7. The issue they were facing was that it only ran for about 12 hours before crashing. And at startup it used less than 100Mb of memory, and at the end (before crashing) it used about 1500Mb. So it clearly had a memory leak. And I needed to find it…fast!
And since this is the first time I have had to do this, I decided to share my experiences. Hopefully it will help someone…
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The title for this post make it sound like the world’s simplest thing. And to be honest, it sort of is. It is not hard to get images from the ViewModels into the view, but there are several ways of doing it. Each with its own pros and cons.
In my world, my VMs often get urls/uris to images instead of the actual image. The reason for this I guess is sort of the same thing as why you shouldn’t store your images in the database. The models can become huge if they include the images, especially if we add a couple different image sizes and so on. And that is without considering the possibility of us transferring a whole array of these objects across the wire. And in a lot of cases we don’t even show all the images in the UI, so why would we pass the images along if we don’t need them…
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A while back, a client asked my company if we could help them with a feature for a web application they were using. They needed to make audio recordings online. Basically the application shows off users portfolios online, and offers the ability to add comments about their work.
So far, all comments and graces have been made using text. But now they wanted to move it into a somewhat more interactive solution, making it possible to record audio comments and thoughts about the users portfolio.
And obviously, being a Microsoft focused company, we came to the conclusion that this would be an easy thing to do in Silverlight. Especially since we all know that Silverlight in later releases gives us access to the users microphone and webcam. So this would be a piece of cake…or would it…?
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A couple of weeks ago…ehh…well…let’s at least call it a couple of weeks ago (it might have been longer to be honest) I posted a blog post about using push notification on the Windows Phone 7 platform. It included more or less everything you needed to start sending push notifications on the pre-beta version of the platform.
However, about a week ago (once again…+- a couple of days) Microsoft released the new beta version of the developer tools as well as the emulator. And I assume they also pushed I to the lucky bastards that already have phones.
In this new beta, they have changed the API for the notifications, and hence destroyed my previous code. So I have updated my sample to use the new tools and the new APIs. So here I go again…
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Windows Phone 7 is still not released, and the APIs, SDK, emulator and so on is till far from complete. Having said that, people are still getting revved up about the platform and have already started to develop on it. I think this is cool, and makes me believe that there will be some really good apps on the market place already on the launch day. Unfortunately, I have been too busy to get too down a dirty with it. I definitely hope to change this, and have decided to build a game. Hopefully it will be complete by launch and I can sell 2 or 3 copies.
But, to be honest, I still feel that the SDK and APIs are changing a bit too much for me to get REALLY excited about it. I really hope that there is a new refresh on the way soon. Cause at the present, I find that there are just too many unknown things that make the development hard. You never know if the issue you are experiencing is due to you doing something wrong or due to a bug in the OS. And if it is a bug in the OS, you don’t really know when or how it will be fixed. And I really don’t want to spend my time working around things now, just to end up with weird an unnecessary workarounds in the code when the final version is released. Having said that, it still doesn’t stop you from playing around with the platform. I can still build most of my game logic and even test it in the browser based version of Silverlight while I wait for the next refresh. One feature that I wanted to try out straight away however is the push notification. Why? Well…let’s just say that I have my reasons…
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