Some quick notes and key words noted during a webinar on Windows Azure giving an overview and explaining new features:

• Install Windows Azure SDK
• Windows Azure
  • Compute
  • Storage
  • Virtual Network
• SQL Azure
  • Database
  • Reporting
  • Data Sync
• Windows Azure AppFabric
  • Service Bus
  • Access Control
  • Caching
• Azure MarketPlace
  • DataMarket
  • Applications
• Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Azure Roles
  • Web Role
  • Worker Role
  • VM Role
• New developer portal (Silverlight)
• Full IIS
  • Multiple Sites
• VM Role
  • Deploy virtual machines in cloud
• Virtual Network
  • Aka as Azure Connect
  • Secure IP connectivity between on-premise and cloud
  • Azure Connect Gateway enables connectivity on local computers
• AppFabric Caching
  • Distributed in-memory cache in cloud
  • SP.NET providers for session state and page output caching

Some quick notes and key words noted during a webinar on Adobe's RIA technology:

• www.riastats.com
• Open Screen Project
• Adobe Flash Player 10.1
• Adobe AIR 2.5
• Design tools: Ps Fw Ai Fc
• Development tool: Fb
• Adobe Flex (Fx) Framework
• Flex Builder standalone in Eclipse or as plug-in

A good article in MSDN Magazine explaining how to create an ASP.NET data-driven site using ASP.NET Dynamic Data. ASP.NET Dynamic Data is a combination of the Entity Framework and ASP.NET Routin allowing an application to respond to URLs that do not physically exist. With these features you can create a production-ready, data-driven Web site in just a few minutes.

In his post 20 Interesting WPF Projects on CodePlex (Some for Silverlight too), Pete Brown makes a selection of interesting and recently maintained WPF projects on CodePlex.

Prism provides guidance designed to help you more easily design and build rich, flexible, and easy-to-maintain Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop applications, Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), and Windows Phone 7 applications. Using design patterns that embody important architectural design principles, such as separation of concerns and loose coupling, Prism helps you to design and build applications using loosely coupled components that can evolve independently but that can be easily and seamlessly integrated into the overall application. These types of applications are known as composite applications.

Prism includes reference implementations, Quick Starts, reusable library code (the Prism Library), and extensive documentation. This version of Prism targets the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Silverlight 4 and includes new guidance around the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, navigation, and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). Because Prism is built on the .NET Framework 4.0 (which includes WPF) and Silverlight 4, familiarity with these technologies is useful for evaluating and adopting Prism.

LINQPad is a LINQ tool letting you interactively query databases in the LINQ query language. It supports all LINQ features of C# 4.0 and .NET Framework 4.0: LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework, and LINQ to XML.

LINQPad comes loaded with a lot of LINQ examples, making it a good way for learning LINQ.

LINQPad can also be used as C# scratch pad that instantly executes any C# expression, statement block or program with rich output formatting.

The presentation Windows AppFabric Overview uses an interesting terminology and division of service clients and services in a general services architecture:

• Front-End Clients
  • Web Browser & RIA (AJAX, Silverlight)
  • WPF & WinForms
  • Mobile Clients
• Middle-Tier Clients
  • ASP.NET Pages
  • Other Services
• Back-End Services
  • WCF SOAP Services
  • WCF Workflow Services

 Some notes on the general services architecture:

• Services provide functionality to front-end and middle-tier clients.
• Front-end clients can request service functionality through the middle-tier clients or directly from the back-end services.
• Back-end services implement entity, task, and utility service models, provide access to data, and expose application logic.
• Example of entity, task, and utility service model: Customer, Invoice Approval, Tax Calculation.
• WCF SOAP services are defined with code and implement entity and utility service models.
• WCF workflow services are visually defined, provide support for long running processes, and implement task service models.
• Services of one implementation type can easily call services of the other type.

Sander Hoogendoorn gave an interesting talk at TechEd Europe 2010, explaining the technique of using smart use cases in software development.

Smart use cases are a solid unit of work in agile projects, supporting easy estimation of software projects, identifying functional re-use early in projects, front-to-back traceability and automated unit testing. 

For more information on smart use cases and the agile software development platform they are part of, see the Accelerated Delivery Platform (ADP) for Agile Development Wiki.

Scott Hanselman gave a very interesting talk at PDC 2010, which he called “ASP.NET + Packaging + Open Source = Crazy Delicious”. It is a “no slides” talk that demonstrates how to code an application from start to finish using ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor, NuGet, EF Code First, SQL CE, and several other cool things.

You can watch the talk online or download it from one of following links:

• Low Bandwidth WMV Video (about 258 megs)
• Low Bandwidth MP4 Video (about 120 megs)

It is entertaining and demonstrates how all the pieces of the ASP.NET MVC 3 stack (and especially NuGet) fit together.

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