It’s a great day for cross platform .Net as Mono v2.0 is released. Now fully stocked with ADO.NET 2.0 / ASP.NET 2.0 / Windows Forms 2.0 as well as a C# 3.0 compiler and LINQ support. It also ships with a nice collection of ADO.NET providers that are not available in the Microsoft distribution, as well as the usual non-Windows native goodies. Interesting too see that they are also shipping the C5 collections library, indicating that this is probably an area of base libraries that needs more work, features and standardization. Read More...

Steve Martin, Senior Director of Product Management in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division (CSD), made an pre-announcement yesterday on some technologies a bunch of us outside folks have been looking at the last year or so in development in CSD. They are a quite exciting bunch of technologies that will Microsoft is extending the capabilities of Windows Server, by adding a set of capabilities, "Dublin" , aimed at making it easier to deploy, manage and monitor WF/WCF applications. The has been a pain point and need for some years now, particuarly around having to build your own WF hosts. Some of this originally fell under the "Oslo" long-term vision which I blogged way in the past as a general vision. As the plans and the products become more concrete, it seems like just the "modeling platform" will be what we refer to as Oslo from now on. See my former collegue Brian Loesgen's post for better clarity on this. Rather than repeat him and my friend Matt Winkle from CSD, please see Matt's post details of the features of WF/WCF 4.0. Read More...

The next release of CSLA .NET for Silverlight will return to using the async WcfProxy in the data portal instead of the SynchronizedWcfProxy that restricts the data portal to allow only one concurrent call at a time. The WcfProxy allows parallel calls from the client to the server through the data portal. The change is already in svn for those that are using live code. The reason we created SynchronizedWcfProxy originally was due to a bug in Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2, where in some cases you'd get a 404 error with overlapping WCF calls to the same server. This was wreaking havoc with our unit tests, which have a lot of parallel WCF calls. It appears that the issue is resolved in Silverlight RC0, which is great news. However, we didn't know right away, because we were still getting sporadic 404 errors. With some research, and help from Eugene Osovetsky and his colleagues at Microsoft, we figured out the remaining issue. Part of the problem is described by Eugene's post on dealing with faults and exceptions in Silverlight . This was masking the underlying issue we faced. The underlying issue is that we were testing using the ASP.NET Development Web server (often called Cassini). Cassini has some well-known limitations, among them that it doesn't work well when a custom .NET principal is used in your web server code. This particular issue appears as a SerializationException as Cassini attempts to transfer the principal from one thread to another. This issue doesn't occur with IIS, because Read More...

Dunn Training is offering a CSLA .NET Master Class in November, located in Atlanta. This is a full 5 day class covering CSLA .NET, and related technologies such as WPF, WCF, Web Forms and much more! Not only will this provide intensive coverage of CSLA .NET, but you'll learn an amazing amount about the application of important .NET technologies in the context of real-world business application development. Read More...

Version 3.6 Beta 1 of CSLA .NET for Windows and CSLA .NET for Silverlight is now available. The new Silverlight version requires Silverlight 2.0 RC0. Our focus in the last couple pre-releases has been stability, and this is true for Beta 1 as well. There are no new features in this release, just some fixes for reported issues, and of course making sure the code works with Silverlight RC0. Please report any issues you find on the forums at http://forums.lhotka.net , thank you! Read More...

Pluralsight's weekly WF/WCF screencast series is now part of a new Channel9 show dedicated to these technologies -- it's called the "Endpoint" show and you can find it at http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Endpoint/ . The show alternates between WCF and WF topics every four episodes, and is posted weekly on Weds mornings (8am Pacific) - so check it out regularly if you're interested in these technologies. Read More...

A few weeks ago I posted what was basically a request for input on one aspect of the future of CSLA .NET. I got a lot of really thoughtful and useful feedback and input from that post (and a related thread in the forum). I've also been discussing this with Apress and other colleagues, and I've come to a decision. Starting with version 3.6, CSLA .NET for Windows and CSLA .NET for Silverlight will be maintained in C# only. This will allow me to focus more of my energies on improving the framework, and on providing resources and materials on how to use the framework (in both C# and VB). In the short term this means continuing to finalize version 3.6 and to finish Expert C# 2008 Business Objects (current availability target is December). However , I am willing to take some people up on their offer to help maintain the VB version of the framework, if those offers still stand. The idea would be to have the community keep the VB code base in sync with the C# code base as it evolves - at least for CSLA .NET for Windows. And here's a possible incentive. If the VB code can be brought up to sync by mid-December or so, I will work with Apress to create Expert VB 2008 Business Objects following the C# edition of the book. I really can't do that book in VB unless the framework exists in VB, but if that can happen then I'm pretty sure we can make the book happen shortly thereafter. Contributors will need to sign a contributor agreement, to keep everything clear and legal. And they'll use the Read More...