Sam Gentile's Blog

WF/AppFabric/WCF

• WF4 Activity Pack CTP1 Available (State Machine, Database) - Matt Winkle announces that the WF4 Activity Pack CTP1 is now available for download.  This release consists of two different activities, database activities for interacting with a database and the much anticipated State Machine for authoring event driven workflows.
• State Machine Activity Pack and ADO.NET Activity Pack CTP1 Release now Available - Ron Jacobs has links to the same announcement with some great screen shots
• How to Create a Workflow Service using a Flowchart - Now that Flowcharts are in WF4, one wonders if you can create a workflow service. Ron Jacobs provides a template and detailed instructions
• Developing Web Services on IIS with Windows Server AppFabric - While Windows Server AppFabric is a great addition to your server to production management monitoring and troubleshooting you might be interested to learn that it can also be very useful at development time. Ron Jacobs provides detailed instructions
• endpoint.tv - Windows Server AppFabric - Configuring Monitoring Data - Ron Jacobs again...Windows Server AppFabric has extensive monitoring capabilities, which go beyond simply writing events to the server event log. In this video, Michael McKeown explains how you can configure the monitoring level and scope for your workflows and services deployed in IIS with AppFabric.
• WCF4 Samples and Training - Dr. Nick provides a link to the WCF 4 sample collection download which includes over 200 WCF samples from both .NET 4 and past releases
• DevConnections VS 2010 Launch Event Sessions - Brian shares slides and demos from his sessions at DevConnectuons: Workflow 4 Service Applications, Workflow 4 Custom Activities and Unit Testing Workflows and Services

Patterns & Practices

• Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 Released! - Grigori announces world-wide availability of 5.0 of this flagship collection of reusable app blocks. It includes Support for the .NET 4.0 Framework and integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• A Guide to Parallel Programming - Drafts of Chapters 2 and 3 and also A Guide to Parallel Programming - Drafts of Preface and chapters 1 - From the Preface: This book describes patterns for parallel programming, with code examples that use the Parallel Extensions of .NET Framework 4.0 and the Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) that are shipped with Visual Studio 2010. You can use the patterns described in this book to improve your application’s performance on multicore computers. Adopting the patterns in your code will make your application run faster today but will also help prepare for future hardware environments, which are expected to have an increasingly distributed computing architectures

Oslo

• SQL Server Modeling CTP (November 2009 Release 3) for Visual Studio 2010 RTM Now Available - Chris Sells announces a release compatible with VS2010

VS2010/.NET Framework 4

• VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (Breakpoints, DataTips, Import/Export) - ScottGu  twenty-first in a series of blog posts he's doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  This blog post covers a few of the nice usability improvements coming with the VS 2010 debugger.