Agile/Software Development/ALT.NET The Art of Agile Development: Collective Code Ownership Raymond provides an entry into lean methodologies Jeffery was on the Software Quality Isn't Optional panel and the video is available The StyleCop team announced the release of a version 4.3 of the StyleCop tool . You can get it from here . Another e-book called Data Structures and Algorithms by Granville Barnett and Luca Del Tongo and is hosted on DotNetSlackers .  The book is a free PDF download.

.NET Reflector, by Lutz Roeder, must be one of the most useful tools I have when developing .NET code. Usually it is the first thing I install right after Visual Studio not even waiting until I need it because I know I will. So the big news is that Red Gate, makers of the Ants profiler and lots of other tools, are taking over from Lutz Roeder and will continue developing .NET Reflector. Interesting move and I hope this means a bright future for the .NET Reflector. Read more about this here . Enjoy!

A quick one while I am on vacation. .NET 3.5 SP1 Mr. Hanselman has come out with the mother of all .NET 3.5 SP1 posts with Hidden Gems - Not the same old 3.5 SP1 post , which includes coverage of all the areas including my WCF changes . Announcing Entity Framework & ADO.NET Data Services RTM! Orcas SP1 Improvement: Asynchronous WCF HTTP Module/Handler for IIS7 for Better Server Scalability WCF Request Throttling and Server Scalability IronRuby/Ruby Part 7 of Justin's outstanding Learning

As I listed in this post on the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 , there are a bunch of significant additions to WCF in SP1. The list looks pretty focused towards REST services and the Web. It's no secret that many developers are looking to REST and the simpler programming model for Web applications. In this regard, Microsoft is perhaps playing catch up here adding first-class REST features alongside the premier WS-* features. With WCF being extensible this has been fairly simple and has resulted in a

As Cliff announces , CSD is partnering up with my friends Aaron and the PluralSight folks on a new weekly .NET developer screencast series to show how to accomplish tasks in WF/WCF 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. This week, for the inaugural screencast, CSD MVP Aaron Skonnard walks you through how to create your first WCF Service . The screencast guides the viewer through creating the service from scratch in VS2008 - defining a data contract, a service contract, and testing/hosting the service in VS2008.

It is available from the subscriptions download at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/default.aspx Get it while it is hot Enjoy!

Of course, this is so much more than a Service Pack with the release now of ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) and the Entity Framework among others. In my area of interest, CSD, there are some significant changes for REST programming (1st class citizen now) as well as some other additions: There were several enhancements to WCF in .NET Framework SP1 that make it easier for developers to build and deploy a broader, more scalable set of Web Services: Improvements in writing REST based services ranging

In a previous blog post I write about what happens when you place a TransactionScopeActivity within a ReceiveActivity and an exception occurs that is supposed to roll back the transaction. In short the story was very bad and we could come up with only a partial workaround, not a pretty sight. But there is more to it than just that little horror story. Suppose you do the obvious and place the a TransactionScopeActivity within a ReceiveActivity and no exception occurs. Say like the workflow below,

I got an email from a friend last week asking about using a ReceiveActivity and, while receiving, using a TransactionScopeActivity to transitionally save some data in a database. Seems like a common enough scenario right? Well he was having some problems. If everything worked and the transaction succeeded everything was fine and the answer came back. But if an exception occurred and the transaction was aborted be was receiving a real weird error: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[System.ServiceModel.ExceptionDetail]:

I thought today may be a good topic for my audience as it go well together with my 3 part WF series (link here...) just as some of yesterday augments this post on WCF 101. Technorati Tags: WF , Windows Workflow , WCF , Indigo , BizTalk Server