Behaviors in WCF have changed a bit since the Jan CTP that we were using. It's been a bit difficult to find any good info about what the changes are, and how to implement them in the June CTP.

We are hosting in IIS, so web.config describes the behaviors.

Here's an article about what the behaviors are, which pieces of the WCF pipeline they affect, and how to configure them.

Attaching Extensions Using Behaviors

---

(update 7/31/06)
Thanks a lot to Marc Mercuri for your comment. He links to a post on his blog that contains sample code from his new WCF book. FINALLY, a definitive example of how to wire up custom behaviors on the client and service side, via .config files. (until now, all I keep finding around the web are samples that programatically hookup the behaviors).

See comments for this post, or hit Marc's link

(update 8/11/06)
Now I'm hooking up IErrorHandler functionality. In Jan CTP, your service implementation only had to derive from IErrorHandler and the WCF runtime would find the object and call the ProvideFault method. Now in June CTP, you have to register the error handler using channelDispatcher.ErrorHandlers.Add( someErrorHandlerObject ) in the ApplyDispatchBehavior method.

More general info here, and specific discussion of IErrorHandler methods here.




(more to come...)

I noticed this on a co-worker's blog. Thanks to Bill for the info.

We work on some pretty cool projects at InterKnowlogy. We are a "Microsoft Gold Partner", providing custom software architecture, design, and implementation services to companies throughout San Diego, Orange County, and lately, around the country.

Anyway - we typically work with either the latest released software such as .NET 2.0, Visual Studio Team System, SQL Server 2005, etc. ... and then quite often we go one step further and do projects with Beta software such as .NET 3.0 (WPF, WF, WCF), Office 2007, etc.

Channel9 did a feature on one of our coolest projects - The Scripps Research Institute’s Collaborative Molecular Environment

Uses WPF, WinForms, Office 2007 to a Sharepoint 2007 backend.

The question often comes up, what's the difference between ASMX and WCF? Aaron Skonnard summarizes the diffs nicely in this table.

For more background on the diffs and migrating from ASMX to WCF, see the full MSDN article.

Service Station: All About ASMX 2.0, WSE 3.0, and WCF -- MSDN Magazine, January 2006

Back to Scott Hansleman's blog to find some very cool tools for ASP.NET development.

WATIR = Web Application Testing in Ruby

Using WATIR as a startup program in ASP.NET projects.

WatirRecorder - (WatirMaker) record your watir scripts

A good read for a basic understanding of Unicode and character sets. Keep this reference to point others to when discussing Unicode issues.

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software

I've always struggled with VS.NET 2003 and adding a solution to source control from within the VS.NET IDE. It always seems to add a folder for the solution root, then the projects in their own sub folders.

Ta-da...found the article that explains it.

VS.NET 2003 differs from 2002 in how this solution root is handled.

Bottom line:
there's a REG key that will make VS.NET 2003 NOT create the solution root, then subfolders.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\SourceControl] "DoNotCreateSolutionRootFolderInSourceControl"=dword:00000001

(update)
This still seems to work for VS 2005 as well. The reg key is in the ...\VisualStudio\8.0\SourceControl directory as expected.

(good thing I have the reg key above - the article linked above seems to have disappeared)

I've been pretty busy at our current client - since I've been falling behind on my MSDN reading, here are some articles for me to remember to get back to and read one of these days...

• Serialization in WCF. link
• Security in WCF. link
• Common ASP.NET pitfalls. link
• One of these talks about Asynchronous ASP.NET pages, with a link to more detailed info.
  
• Monitor your apps with System.Diagnostics. link
• Building the MSDN aggregation system. link
  
• The performance benefits of NGen. link
• Let the CLR find bugs for you with managed debugging assistants. link
• Inside MSBuild - Custom tasks. link
  

Wow - didn't have NEARLY enough time to get through this LONG post, but interesting enough to keep in my back pocket.

Whenever you attend a MS developer conference, you see how many PM's there are doing almost all of the speaking. Ever wondered, what the hell is a PM at MS anyway?

Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk : PM at Microsoft

Update 7/14/06
Now we're moving to the June CTP. Here's the latest list of changes:

Vista Beta 2 to June CTP

Install bits - since they're usually buried when the next CTP is released:

• .NET 3.0 (formerly WinFX)
• Windows SDK (ISO image here)
• VS 2005 Extensions for Workflow
• VS Orcas Dev Tools (optional)
  

Breaking changes summary
Detailed changes

(Ed's blog has dead links, so I re-found the links below on another blog)

Feb CTP to Vista Beta 2

Breaking changes summary
Detailed changes

Jan CTP to Feb CTP

Breaking changes summary
Detailed changes

Ed's Blog: WCF Jan CTP to Feb CTP Breaking Changes


WCF Beta 1 to Nov CTP Breaking Changes

Starting to play with WCF and running into differences between the MS online help and what's working in the November CTP.

Here is a list of breaking changes (mostly name changes)

Ed's Blog : WCF Beta 1 to Nov CTP Breaking Changes

I was alerted to this via the Enterprise Library forums - it's a tool that you can use to edit .NET 2.0 web.config files.

You can validate configuration, encrypt configuration files, and manage changes in configuration differences for deployment scenarios (this last point is great - we've had challenges at past clients where differences between test and prod environments require manual edit or custom sections in config)

.NET Configuration Manager

Buddy Joel at IK found this - a faster way to dynamically retrieve property values without using reflection.

This technique uses dynamic IL code generation to create the code for the property on the fly, then caches the IL for later use.

Fast Dynamic Property/Field Accessors - The Code Project - C# Programming

At a client, we've been doing a lot of WCF work, and are quite often inspecting SOAP messages "in the raw" as they travel between client and server. (Most of the time, this is a good way to prove that the UI is not correctly calling our services, so it's "their fault"). :)

We've been using MSSoapT3 (part of the SOAP Toolkit), but here are a couple other options. Apparently they work using the proxy server settings on the client, instead of changing the configured (hardcoded?) URLs on the client.

TcpTrace | proxyTrace

My buddy Gomez (the ultimate Xbox know it all [at least in my book, heh] ) will be stoked to hear about this.

Apparently someday it will be possible to build games for the Xbox (assuming 360?) using managed code and a new .NET API for the Xbox graphics engine. Not sure if they mean *anyone* can write games and download them to the console?

ScottGu's Blog : Using .NET to Build Cool Games for XBox