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.NET 3.5 will help you create better Windows applications, build Web Services that are more powerful, implement new Workflow projects and dramatically enhance the user's experience. But it does so with what appears to be a collection of disparate technologies. In Programming .NET 3.5, bestselling author Jesse Liberty and industry expert Alex Horovitz uncover the common threads that unite the .NET 3.5 technologies, so you can benefit from the best practices and architectural patterns baked into this newest generation of Microsoft frameworks. While single-topic .NET 3.5 books delve into Windows Presentation Foundation and the other frameworks in greater detail, Programming .NET 3.5 offers a "Grand Tour" of the release that describes how the four principal technologies can be used together, with Ajax, to build modern n-tier and service-oriented applications. Developers have struggled to implement these patterns with previous versions of the .NET Framework, but this hands-on guide uses real-world examples and fully annotated source code to demonstrate how .NET 3.5 can make it easy. The concepts and technologies that this book covers include:

• XAML -- Microsoft's new XML-based markup language for UI, used with WPF Windows Presentation Foundation
  
• (WPF) -- a new presentation framework and graphics subsystem for Windows that puts Vista-like effect in your grasp
  
• Ajax Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) - a new standards-based framework that enables applications to communicate across a network using a variety of protocols
• Workflow Foundation (WF) -- framework for defining, executing, and managing workflows
  
• CardSpace -- framework for managing the identities of your user

You'll learn how to useeach of the four frameworks alone and in concert to build a series of meaningful example applications. Examples are written in C#, and all of the source code will be available for download at both the O'Reilly and the authors' site, which offers access to a free support forum. Between them, authors Jesse Liberty and Alex Horovitz have nearly forty years of experience in delivering commercial applications for companies such as Citibank, Apple, AT&T, NeXt, PBS, Ziff Davis, and dozens of smaller organizations. Their combined experience is valuable for telling the story of .NET 3.5 and how it will shorten the development life cycle for applications developers, and enhance your productivity.

• Part of the new .NET 3.0 extensions to .NET 2.0, WCF provides a unified platform for building and running connected systems and will be used by almost every .NET or SQL Server developer
• Targeted to experienced developers who want to build service-oriented and transactional applications on the Microsoft platform that offer reliable and secure transactional messaging
• Addresses the WCF technologies as well as the next generation of configuring and deploying network-distributed services
• Key topics discussed include binding, contracts, clients, services, security, deployment, management, and hosting

Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX: From Novice to Professional aims to give you the skills you need to start building web applications with Microsoft’s next–generation technology as quickly as possible. Whether you’re interested in ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, or the technologies that support them (WPF, WCF, WF, etc.), this book is the starting point that you need.

It adopts a “zero to hero” approach that concentrates on achieving practical results you can use in real projects rather than presenting a deep academic treatment that can’t be immediately applied.

The aim is to give you, the reader, the knowledge you need to achieve the results you want with the minimum of fuss. When you’ve read this book, you’ll have a solid understand of all the techniques that are available, when to use them, and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

What you’ll learn

• Create next–generation web applications quickly and easily!
• Manipulate data, display information, and communicate with other services using the latest ASP.NET techniques and best practices.
• Discover how the .NET 3.0 extensions (WPF, WCF, and WF) can make your web applications faster, more efficient, and easier to code than ever.
• Understand how ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight can be integrated into your ASP.NET websites in order to provide a cutting–edge user interface for your applications and the implications that such interfaces can have.

Who is this book for?

This book is for anyone with an interest in using Microsoft’s latest web development technologies.

A basic familiarity with the .NET platform is useful, but anyone with an understanding of a web development language will benefit from the book, as all the key topics are presented from first principals.

About the Apress Beginning Series

The Beginning series from Apress is the right choice to get the information you need to land that crucial entry–level job. These books will teach you a standard and important technology from the ground up because they are explicitly designed to take you from “novice to professional.” You’ll start your journey by seeing what you need to know—but without needless theory and filler. You’ll build your skill set by learning how to put together real–world projects step by step. So whether your goal is your next career challenge or a new learning opportunity, the Beginning series from Apress will take you there—it is your trusted guide through unfamiliar territory!

“Whether this is the first time or the fifty-first time you’re using WCF, you’ll learn something new by reading this book.”

 --Nicholas Allen, Program Manager, Web Services, Microsoft

 

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is the easiest way to produce and consume Web services on the Microsoft platform. With .NET 3.5, WCF has been extensively revamped--and Visual Studio 2008 gives developers powerful new tools for utilizing it. Essential Windows Communication Foundation shows developers exactly how to make the most of WCF with .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008.

 

Drawing on extensive experience working with early adopters, three Microsoft insiders systematically address the topics developers ask about WCF. The authors approach each subject with practical advice and present best practices, tips, and tricks for solving problems. Throughout, you’ll find detailed explanations, solutions for the “pain points” of WCF development, and an extensive collection of reusable code examples. Coverage includes

• Using WCF contracts to define complex structures and interfaces
• Understanding WCF’s channel stacks and channel model architecture
• Configuring the WCF communication stack to use only the protocols you need
• Using standard and custom service behaviors to manage concurrency, instances, transactions, and more
• Serializing data from .NET types to XML Infosets and representing Infosets “on the wire”
• Hosting WCF services via IIS, managed .NET applications, and Windows Activation Services
• WCF security, in depth: authentication; transport and message-level security; and Internet and intranet scenarios
• Improving reliability: exception handling, diagnostics, and more
• Workflow services: new integration points between WCF 3.5 and Windows Workflow Foundation
• Building client-to-client, peer network-based applications
• Utilizing WCF for non-SOAP Web services: AJAX and JSON examples and .NET 3.5 hosting classes

Microsoft’s Steve Resnick, Richard Crane, and Chris Bowen are technology experts at the Microsoft Technology Center in Boston. They specialize in helping customers improve their technical agility by applying WCF and related technologies. Resnick has specialized in Internet technologies and distributed computing at Microsoft since 1995. He is a frequent speaker at Microsoft events and is now technology director for the U.S. Microsoft Technology Centers. Crane has more than 15 years of experience in senior software development roles. He specializes in large-scale Web sites, distributed computing, transactional systems, and performance analysis. Bowen has been an architect and developer for more than 15 years at companies such as Monster.com and Staples and is co-author of Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System.

 

Foreword xxv

Preface xxvii

Chapter 1: Basics 1

Chapter 2: Contracts 33

Chapter 3: Channels 91

Chapter 4: Bindings 111

Chapter 5: Behaviors 181

Chapter 6: Serialization and Encoding 241

Chapter 7: Hosting 287

Chapter 8: Security 315

Chapter 9: Diagnostics 375

Chapter 10: Exception Handling 403

Chapter 11: Workflow Services 423

Chapter 12: Peer Networking 459

Chapter 13: Programmable Web 503

Appendix: Advanced Topics 537

Index 553

In May 2001, Microsoft announced the Office XP suite and introduced the concept of Smart Tags. This technology provides the dynamic recognition of text or data within a document and allows the association of various actions with the text. In this article, Darshan Singh looks at how we can build a smart tag handler DLL in Visual Basic 6.0 that uses the .NET web service to get the data. The smart tag handler discussed here allows travel agents to get their corporate clients' travel details as soon as the clients' identification numbers are entered in Excel 2002. The smart tag handler recognizes the corporate client ID, sends a request to .NET web service that returns the travel details in XML format, and the smart tag handler processes the returned XML using Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) 4.0 and fills the information into an Excel sheet.

In this article, Wilhe York illustrates how he successfully integrated an existing Microsoft infrastructure with non-Microsoft technologies after his company was taken over. Wilhe will show a solution that allowed him to keep an intranet that was already being used by his co-workers while integrating data from the parent company - with the only visible difference to the end user being an increase in information.

Wilhe will discuss how the intranet was transformed to support data marshalling from the parent company data to his system. In his examination, he will be using classic ASP as a client communicating with JSP pages on a Tomcat server as the data endpoint. You'll be setting up Tomcat on a Win2k box for development purposes, and you'll be using XML documents as data sources for JSP.

Fully updated for version 1.1 of the .NET Framework, .NET Framework Essentials, 3rd Edition is an objective, concise, no-nonsense overview of the Microsoft .NET Framework for developing web applications and services. Written for intermediate to advanced VB, C/C++, Java, and Delphi developers, .NET Framework Essentials, 3rd Edition is also useful to system architects and leaders who are assessing tools for future projects. .NET Framework Essentials touches all the bases-- from the Common Language Run-Time (CLR) and key class libraries to the specialized packages for ASP.NET, Windows Forms, XML Web Services, and data access (ADO.NET). The authors survey each major .NET language, including VB.NET, C#, J#, and Managed C++, as well as MSIL, clearing away the noise and hype, and presenting a clear, practical look at the underlying technologies. .NET Framework Essentials also provides a handy reference to the most commonly used features of .NET Framework

This newest programming guide by bestselling author Jesse Liberty isn't your typical Visual Basic book. It's not a primer on the language, and it won't dull your brain with arguments hyping .NET either. Its goal, rather, is to make you immediately productive, creating Windows and Web applications using Visual Basic 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.

Written for VB6 and novice programmers, the book shows how Visual Basic 2005 can be used to rapidly build modern Windows and web applications.

What makes this book different is what's not included. There's no introduction to Visual Basic, no explanation of how it fits into the .NET world. Why waste time reading about something you'll learn for yourself as soon as you start creating applications? You won't even write a "Hello World" program. With Programming Visual Basic 2005 you'll get started building something meaningful, right away.

The book is divided into three parts--Building Windows Applications, Building Web Applications, and Programming with Visual Basic--each of which could be a book on its own. The author shares his thorough understanding of the subject matter through lucid explanations and intelligently designed lessons that guide you to increasing levels of expertise. By the time you've finished the book, you'll know how to program both Windows and web applications with VB 2005.

The support for this book extends beyond its covers. Jesse offers a FAQ, Errata, complete source code and a link to a free private support discussion center on his web site: LibertyAssociates.com - just click on books.

Jesse Liberty, Microsoft .NET MVP, is the best-selling author of O'Reilly Media's Programming ASP.NET and over a dozen other books on web and object-oriented programming. Jesse is a frequent contributor to many industry publications and websites, and has spoken at numerous industry events. He is a former Distinguished Software Engineer at AT&T and Vice President for technology development at CitiBank.

Jesse Liberty's books have successfully guided thousands of programmers into the world of .NET programming, and Programming Visual Basic 2005 is no exception.

Programming Visual Basic .NET, Second Edition is the complete guide to application development using Visual Basic .NET. Entirely rewritten by .NET expert Jesse Liberty, the new edition of this tutorial will be essential reading for the millions of Visual Basic programmers looking to make the change to Microsoft's .NET programming environment. Thorough, entertaining, and easy to follow, this book provides a comprehensive and detailed overview of the language, object-oriented programming, and the .NET Framework, and goes even further--you'll learn how to create Windows and Web applications, as well as Web services. A comprehensive introduction to the Visual Basic .NET language, this new edition covers topics of greatest concern to VB6 programmers who wish to make the transition from traditional Visual Basic 6 programming to the new object-oriented, component-based world of .NET. Loaded with practical examples for intermediate and advanced programmers, Programming Visual Basic .NET focuses on turning you into a proficient .NET developer.