Nuno Filipe Godinho : Microsoft

PDC09 – Day Three – Building Scalable and Reliable Applications with Windows Azure

NunoGodinho — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:22:41 GMT

Brad Calder – Director/Architect

Data Building Blocks

Types of Storage in Windows Azure

Volatile Storage

Local Storage
Caches (eg. AppFabricCache and MemCache)

Persistent Storage

Windows Azure Storage

Blobs

Provide interface for storing name files

Tables

structured storage.

Queues

reliable storage and delivery of messages

SQL Azure

Storage Account Performance at commercial Availability

Capacity

100TB

Throughput

Up to a few hundred megabytes

Partitioning of Data Objects

Load balancing is an internal concept of Windows Azure Storage

Allows the system to automatically scale out access to your data to meet its peek traffic demands

What matters to the application is the partitioning key used for objects

All objects with the same partition key are always grouped

Per Object/Partitioning Performance for Commercial Availability

Throughput

Single Queue and single table partition

Up to 500 transactions per second

Single Blob

small reads/writes up to 30 MB/s
large reads/writes up to 60 MB/s

Scaling Computation

Compute Service Model – What is describes?

The topology of your service

Types of roles and their binaries
How the roles are connected

Configuration of the service

How many instances of each role type
Application specific configuration settings
How many update domains you need

Best Practices

Due to application failures, upgrades or hardware failure

Use multiple instances

Queue Workflow Concepts

Windows Azure Queue Provides

Guarantee delivery

Worker dequeues Message and marks it as Invisible
Worker deletes Message when finished processing

Note: If worker role crashes, message becomes visible for another worker to process

A message may be processed more than once
Assume messages put into same queue can be processed in any order

Best Practice

Make work items idempotent

Scaling Queue Throughput

Batch Work Items into Blob

Group together many work items into a blob
Queue up pointer to the Blob for the message

Use Multiple Queues

Job Manager

Responsible form managing the execution of the Queues

Work Items

Continuation for Long Running Work Items

Want to continue on failover
High level approach

Bread work item into smaller and repeatable steps
Record progress

Lifecycle Management

In-place Rolling updates

Specify the number of upgrade domains in service model

Breaks your roles evenly over the number of domains

Rolling upgrade

Walk each upgrade domain one at a time
Upgrade just the roles in the current domain

Benefits

Minimizes availability loss

Only one domain of roles are restarted at a time

Allows local state to be uses across upgrades
Caches application upgrade issues early

Detect upgrade issues after first few domains

Versioning with Rolling Updates

Always assume you will have old and new running side by side in your service
Version Everything

Protocols, Schemas, Messages and everything else

Windows Azure Tables Schema change

Have a version property in each entity
Types of Schema changes

Adding a non-key property

Perform similar step update process
Update “IgnoreMissingProperties”

Removing a non-key property

Perform similar upgrade process
Update “IgnoreMissingProperties”

Changes in Partition Key or Row Key

Most uses schema change is adding a non-key property

PDC09 – Day Two – Advanced Topics for Building Large-Scale Applications with Microsoft Silverlight

NunoGodinho — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:17:45 GMT

MVVM – Model-View-ViewModel

Separation of concerns
View = handled UI
Model = contains pure data
ViewModel = communicates between View and Model through bindings
Works Great with Silverlight and WPF

XAML based data bindings

Testable

Model

Represents the Data
The entity
Not required to know where it gets the data from

WCF service, WCF Ria Services

View

The Screen, the UI

ViewModel

Main source of logic for the MVVM triad
Connects the Model and the View
Abstracts the View
Public Properties that are bound to the View
INotifyPropertyChanged and INotifyCollectionChanged talk to the view through bindings
Listens for changes from the View made to the Model

Variations of the MVVM

View First

ViewModel is declared as StaticResource in the Views XAML

Works well in Blend

Another way is to create the ViewModel in the View’s code-behind

ViewModel First

View is injected into the ViewModel’s constructor
Doesn’t allow the possibility to use Blend

View and ViewModel Marriage

View must be paired with the ViewModel somehow
Doesn’t allow the possibility to use Blend

What don’t we have with MVVM

Commanding

Prism 2

Prism is a set of options
Use what you want and ignore the rest
Technical Concepts:

Modules
Shell
Commands
Containers
Regions
Bootstrapper
Event Aggregation
Unity and Dependency Injection

PDC09 – Day Two – Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 from the Inside out

NunoGodinho — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:15:25 GMT

Bob Schmidt – Program Manager

For WF4:

Programs are data
Scheduler-based program execution
- stackless & serializable
Runtime-mediated code rendezvous
Natural Control flow
- run it the way you think of it

Authoring

WF is an activity

Can author programmatically or using XAML
Can contain other activities
Separate base classes for activities that return a value

WF program is a definition from which many instances can be created

Each instance of an activity has a unique environment (visible data values)

Execution

WF runtime just sees activities and not sequence or parallel or recurrence

WF runtime is a referee that enforces the rules of the work
CacheMetadata is how an activity describes itself

WF runtime knows when an activity is done
An activity can schedule the execution of a child activity and be notified upon its completion

There can be multiple, distinct method invocations per activity
Can Express all kinds of patterns (control flow)

There can be multiple paths of invocation …

Scheduler

WorkItem represents the invocation of a method
WorkItems can be created by:

Activity Code
External Code

Flow of execution

The Activity Code or the External Code Add a WorkflowItem
Them the elements get Pushed or Enqueued for execution
Afterwards the Scheduler will Pop it and execute it

Details

Scheduler per program instance
Manages an ordered list of work items

Threading Model

One thread at a time is used to process work items for a program instance

Simplifies the programming model of activities
Thread may differ work items in the same instance

WF runtime uses host-provided SynchronizationContext
Standard TLS mechanisms do not apply to WF

Instead use WF Execution Properties – names properties visible for a part of a workflow
Attached / detached from the current environment by the WF runtime before / after work item invocation

Activities should not block this thread

Bookmarks

Problems

What happens when your programs need to wait for input?
We want a “Zero footprint” WaitForInput()

Bookmark

A named resumption point in a WF program
Resumption will schedule an activity’s callback method
WF runtime mediates resumption – no need for the instance to be in memory

WCF Receive activity is built on top of bookmarks in order to give access to this possibility when using Workflow Services

Persistence

lets you pause an instance, save it somewhere & resume it later

has no affinity to a WF host instance, CLR instance, thread, process or machine

instances of WF are serializable

A CLR Stack is not serializable, but in WF program a stack only exists transiently, during work item execution

Sometimes you want a “no persist zone”

Automatic during execution of an async activity

Details of persistence are deliberately separate from the machinery of WF runtime

Serializable Instances

Contains

Work Item list
Bookmarks
Data (arg and values)

Environment for all executing activity instances

Activity instance info (callbacks, execution props)
Custom Data from persistence participants

Doesn’t contain

Workflow Definition
Why?

several instances can share the same workflow definition
management of definitions is responsibility of the host

PDC09 – Day Two – Developing Advanced Applications with Windows Azure

NunoGodinho — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:56:04 GMT

Steve Marx – Technology Strategist

Now we can have the ability to have more than a Web and a Work Role, since we have several different types of Roles.

Example:

IIS Role
SMTP Role
…

Now the there is the new Storage API that is currently being shipped with the SDK and not only a sample.

Some new features:

Inter-role communication
Non-Http endpoints
Role instance lifecycle
VM Sizes
Full-trust in the Cloud
Local Storage

Upgrading the local storage

How to model you application

Draw the boxes and arrows
Each box is a role

Which receive traffic from the internet
Which need IIS?

Receive Traffic: Input Endpoints

Different ports on same domain
There’s always load balancing
Declared in ServiceDefinition.csdef
Handled by IIS

InputEndpoint

Defined the protocol, port and name of the endpoint that will opened in order to listen for the requests
Protocols supported

Http
Https
Tcp

RoleEnvironment is the class that allow us to communicate with the Windows Azure fabric, for example in order to know the Configurations

Aside about Email

Spammers will use Windows Azure then the IP ranges can get blacklisted

Best Practices: Use a relay service in order not to have your mails marked as SPAM

Send mail via a rely mail
Receive mail is fine

Searching

Lucene.NET

Popular search API
.NET port of original Java implementation

Index data

Bring index up to speed on startup
Continually update index

Serve searched (via WCF)

Asynchronous Work without a Queue

Queues deliver messages to one worker only
We need every worker to see the message

Solution

use Table instead

Build your own secondary index
Order references

Initialization of Roles

Now we have:

OnStart() – “busy” state, initialization
Run() – do work
OnStop() – traffic stops, graceful shutdown

Internal Endpoints

Declare endpoints in ServiceDefinition.csdef
API to find out what port to listen on RoleEnvironment in Order to know if the port or anything change about the endpoint since the last call

How to Get More RAM

RAMDiectory pouts everything in memory
Choose the VM Size:

Small
Medium
Large
Extra-Large

PDC09 – Day Two - Keynote

NunoGodinho — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:04:10 GMT

Steven Sinofsky

Developing Windows 7

Learning

Solving Problems + Innovation
“Engineering 7” Blog made a very interesting Dialog even without having any code of the product, just about the decisions that were being made
Ecosystem Readiness
Developer Pre-Beta, Beta, RC rhythm
Telemetry

Telemetry

Seed Feedback Button
Hardware and Device Diagnostics
Reliability Analysis Component (RAC)
Software Quality Monitor (SQM)
Windows Error Reporting (WER or “Watson”)

Developing Internet Explorer

Learning

Responsible Engineering
Trustworthy computing
Real-world Interoperability
Innovative Technologies

Updates

Standards Progress

ACID
HTML 5

Performance Improvements

Javascript

Ecosystem Innovations

IE 9 with 3 weeks of development is looking interesting in terms of performance and interoperability
Using Direct2D and DirectWrite to provide better graphics rendering and Hardware Acceleration without any change of the current sites

Windows 7 Call to Action

Integrate with Windows 7 Desktop
Develop 64-bit
Focus on fundamentals in your code
Build on new APIs in Windows 7
Watch more videos today on Channel 9 about Internet Explorer 9

Scott Guthrie – Developer Division

Silverlight 4

Focus

Media

Web and and Microphones

gives you access to the raw access to the input and so you can make the changes you want on that stream, like using PixelShader with it

Multicast streaming

IIS Smooth Streaming

Silverlight Media Framework available today on CodePlex

Output protection
Offline DRM support

Business Applications

Printing

Print Preview Dialogs
Printing Configurations
This is a Print API that you can change however you want and not only a screenshot of the screen

Rich Text
Clipboard access

Local and Central clipboard support

Right Click
Mouse Wheel
Implicit Styles
Drag and Drop
Drop Targets support
Bidi & RTL
HTML

Hosting HTML inside Silverlight application
We can interact with the HTML contents as being a brush

Commanding and MVVM
Data & Networking

Sharing Assemblies across SL and .NET 4.0
Data Binding Improvements
UDP Multicast support
REST Enhancements
WCF Improvements

Main one is TCP channel support

WCF RIA Services

All the capabilities of RIA Services and with all the capabilities of WCF
Works well with OAuth

Visual Studio 2010

WYSIWYG Design Surface
XAML Intellisense
WF and POCO Support

Additional Control
Beyond the Browser

Windowing API
Notification Popups
HTML support
Drop Target support
Opening the Sandbox

Trusted Application

Custom Windows Chrome
Local File System
Cross-file Network
Keyboard support in Full Screen Mode
COM object support in Windows

using dynamic keyword of C#

Access to Several devices form the client machine

Silverlight Performance

Twice as fast

uses JIT like the normal .NET Application

30% faster startup
New Profiling support

Google Chrome will support SL4 also

Schedule

Beta

All the features seen today
VS2010 Tools
Expression Tools

RC
Final Release

First half of Next Year (MIX’10 ????)

Kurt DelBene – Office and Sharepoint 2010

Microsoft Business Productivity Infrastructure

Unified Business Platform

Unified Communications
Business Intelligence
Enterprise Content Management
Collaboration
Enterprise Search

Office and Sharepoint Development Platforms

User Experience

Based in Services and in a Object Model that can be extended in order to create better User Experience

Application Services

Expose all the capabilities in the Applications as services to be consumed without loosing any of the features that we have access inside the solution

Content and Data Management
Interoperability with LOB integration

possibility to more easily integrate the external LOB applications inside the products

Tools and Deployment Flexibility

New Tools for Sharepoint Development
Debug capabilities are currently in the Tools

Now Debug really works. Awesome.

Interesting capability to import a Sharepoint solution to start the project
Possibility to deploy the solution in a sandboxed solution. Interesting in terms of security
Deployment

Simply upload the package generated by Visual Studio 2010 into the sharepoint – Real All-in-One working for deployment also. Now it looks really good for Sharepoint Development.

Announcing the Office and Sharepoint 2010 Public Beta to download www.microsoft.com/2010

Office 2010
Sharepoint Server
Project Server 2010
Visio 2010
Mobile is also available today in the mobile marketplace

Sharepoint has a Silverlight WebPart out of the Box.
Sharepoint 2010 now has the Office Ribbon

Announcing Duet Enterprise for Microsoft Sharepoint and SAP

Consume and extend SAP from Microsoft Sharepoint 2010
Available on the Second-half of 2010

Announcing the Outlook Social Connector

Windows Live, Sharepoint Server, Linkedin
Has an Open SDK that can be used to develop new connectors for this connector

PDC09 – Day One – Code Visualization, UML and DSLs

NunoGodinho — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:31:12 GMT

Cameron Skinner – Product Manager in Visual Studio, responsible for the Architecture Tools in VS2010

Why?

Complexity remains a serious problem

Found everywhere

Code
Requirements
Organizational Politics
and so on…

VS2010 attacks these problems by increasing

Shared understanding between team members
the understanding of existing systems
the ability to gain and maintaining the control over it

Who?

Developers are trying

to understand existing code
focused on the “right fix”

Architects are trying

to understand the Domain and how it relates to implementation
get the solution for the existing projects

Product Capabilities

“Understand the Code”

Architecture Explorer
Sequence Diagram Generation
DGML Graphs and “Standard” Graphs

“Maintain Control”

Layer & Diagram & Custom MSBuild Tasks
Work Item Integration

“Understand the Domain”

UML 2.x Designers

All this capabilities are only in the Ultimate version of VS2010

“Understanding the Code”

In Visual Studio Options, “Mark the Show Misc Documents in Architecture Explorer”

Dependency Diagram

Very interesting Dependency Diagram that represent you application and all the interaction of the solution and you even can search who in your solution is using a specific assembly and what is being made with it.

If we use MEF, Unity or any other Dynamic connection this won’t be possible to see in the Dependency Diagram, since it currently represents only the static dependencies.

Think of Dependency Diagram as read-only, since if you make any change on it he won’t change any of the code of the solution associated.

The Dependency is a DSL that was generated for this version of VS2010.

We can select just the elements that we want to view in the Dependency Diagram and define which level of information we want to have, like:

Assemblies

Namespaces

Types

Methods

We can even filter by access modifiers:

public

private

protected

internal

protected internal

We can navigate to the code from the Dependency Diagram.

Doesn’t work on unmanaged C++, but is currently being done but no date for the release now.

We can interact with the Diagram and extend the DGML model but in a simple model

Possibility to define the level and the center of the dependency that you want to see

Butterfly mode enables the viewing of only the types that are just linking to your central defined element

We can generate the Dependency Diagram based on a Custom selected elements

Note: We can Calculate the Complexity by right-clicking on the Project and selecting the “Calculate Complexity” option of the Context Menu, but this isn’t currently available inside the Dependency Diagram.

Architecture Explorer

Capabilities to filter information about your solution

Ability to look at the Logical and Physical View of the Solution Projects and filtering what you want to filter in terms of inbound or outbound navigation, and this way we’ll have more information's about how our solution is working and how we can maintain it.

Sequence Diagram

Now you have the ability to define the depth of the diagram in terms of levels and them expand if you want more directly on the diagram

Designed to be collaborative and to persist the changes made on the Model, and it will identify the changes that were made on the diagram and associate that change to a new Work Item.

Works on all versions of .NET Framework

Doesn’t generate the code on by changing the Sequence Diagram, just identifies the changes that need to be done

“UML Diagrams”

There’s a new Modeling project in VS2010 that will have all the Diagrams
State Diagrams will be supported as well as all other diagrams from UML
UML Diagrams supported in this version of VS2010:

Use Cases
Class Diagram
Sequence Diagram
Activity Diagram
Component Diagram
Layer Diagram

Very interesting to define the architecture
Capability to validate the architecture by doing static code analysis in order to check all the dependencies and references between the several Layers, and defining the architectural problems as errors in the Error List.
We can get a visual information regarding the layers that are invalid due to the architectural validation
Just for static elements right now, but can be made by extending the pipeline of the Validation of the models

Very interesting Session and a great step for getting real architecture tools inside Visual Studio.

PDC09 – Day One – SQL Azure Present & Futures

NunoGodinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:37:57 GMT

Data Platform as a Service

In the future will have Reporting, Data Analytics

SQL Azure Database

Relational Database service

SQL Server technology foundation
Scalable
Symmetrical

SQL Azure Provisioning

Each account has zero or more servers

Azure wide provisioned in a common portal
Billing instrument

Each server has one or more databases

contains metadata about the databases
Unit of authentication and security
Unit of Geo-location
The server is a logical grouping of you DBs

Each database has standard SQL Object

Unit of consistency
Contains users, tables, views, indexes, and so on,

Global Availability

North Europe
Southeast Asia
North and South USA

Futures

Goal: Provide and end-to-end experience for enterprise departmental apps and Saas ISVs scenarios
Improved Tools

Today we have

VS, SSMS, ADO.NET, ADO.NET Data Service

Data Backups

Multiple replicas of all databases with automatic failover. System backups for additional protection
Use Database Clone to create a clone of the Database with every capabilities of the original one
During 1H 2010

Continuous Backups

Configurable retention and lag period
Backups available for read operations
Local and regional options
During 2H 2010

Operational Models

SaaS

Provisioning APIs for ISVs
Template database support
Meta-data tracking
Additional billing scenarios

Scale-out support –Today

Databases and workloads partitioning is a classic

Better price/performance
Levels of throughput not possible with a single machine

What SQL Azure addresses

Highly available service on top of commodity hardware
Zero administration

There will be available several options and the 10GBs of space is not an issue

Customer Feedback

Add support for profiler, DMV’s
SQLCLR
and much more

Codename “Vidalia”

Sharing to trustworthy collaboration

Cloud is a grate place to connect
Empowers multiple parties
Businesses need control

Very interesting demos, need to see more about it.

PDC09 – Day One – Application Server Technologies – Present & Future

NunoGodinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:23:09 GMT

Cloud: Fifth Generation of computing

Cloud - 2010+
SOA - 2000s
Web - 1990s
Client-Server - 1980s
MainFrame – 1970s

Technology Disruptions

Cheap Processing and Storing
Virtualization
Advances in Networking
Advances in Web Technologies
Emerge of Service Platforms

Application Trends

Service-Oriented
Composite Applications
Model Driven
Scale-out
Elastic
Failure Resilient
Always available
Multi-tenant
Staged Production

AppFabric

Windows Server and Windows Azure platform
Composition

Bases

Windows Azure or Windows Server with Microsoft .NET Framework Available

Main Capabilities

High Availability
Scale Out
Multi-Tenant
Management

High Level Services

Service Bus
Caching
Workflow Hosting
Services Hosting
Monitoring
Access Control

2010 Wave

WCF and WF

Customer Momentum

Adoption of WCF and WF

> 27% year over year growth in developer adoption
Top 5 technologies used by ISV’s

.NET 4.0

Configuration simplification
Service Discovery with WS-Discovery support
Routing Services
REST service improvements

Intuitive flowchart modeling style
New activity model and runtime
Fully declarative authoring and composition
Designer performance and re-hosting
Change from XOML to XAML

Deep integration between WCF and WF

Workflow Services with Supporting activities
Integrated hosting and messaging
Enterprise grade messaging for workflows

Windows AppFabric

Manage Services and Workflows

Infrastructure for enhanced workflow and service hosting, configuration and control
Integration with IIS Manager and PowerShell

Monitor services and Workflows

Infrastructure for storing workflow and service monitoring
Dashboard for information’s regarding the usage

Distributed in-memory application cache (Previously known as “Velocity”
Server/Service symmetry

Symmetric application development, deployment and management
Common scale-out and availability fabric

Server/Services Connectivity

Service Bus for Connectivity
Access Control

Announcing Microsoft Biztalk Server 2009 R2

Customer Momentum

Adoption of Biztalk Server

10kç customers
80% global 1000

Innovations

Platform alignment

Windows Server 2008 R2
SQL Server 2008 R2
VS2010

Productivity Gains
B2B Scenarios Made Easy

Summary

.NET 4.0 (WCF/WF)
Windows Server AppFabric
Microsoft Biztalk 2009 R2

Futures

Server-Service Symmetry

CTP of Windows Azure platform AppFabric in CY10

Common App & Programming Model

End-to-End Composite Applications Model
WCF Service Authoring Simplicity and Scale
WF Activity and Rule Libraries and Tooling

AppFabric

Loosely coupled Message-oriented Event-Driven
Multi-Tenancy

Common End-to-End Management

End-To-End deployment, configuration and management
Dashboard for management

Biztalk Server

Enterprise connector to the AppFabric
Deep platform alignment

Summary

2010 Wave

Rich Framework, server and tools for building service-oriented and distributed Applications
Build upon your existing investments
Scale & Performance Windows Server AppFabric
S+S – Symmetric Host, Development and Deployment

Futures

Agility – Common Application & Programming Model
Elastic Scale and Continuous Availability – Rich AppFabric Services
Enterprise Productivity – Management Model
Multiple Workloads – Unified Application Server for ASP.NET, Biztalk Server

Very interesting in terms of leveraging all the capabilities of “Dublin”, WCF, WF, Velocity, Multi-Tenancy, Scaling Out and so on.

PDC09 – Day One – Software + Services Identity Roadmap Update

NunoGodinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:01:55 GMT

Announcement: WIF – Windows Identity Foundation RTW

Extensions to .NET for claim-based identity
http://www.microsoft.com/wif

Interesting Changes

“Genera” Server is now called “Active Directory Federation Services 2.0” and comes as part of Windows Server 2008 and not separately.
“Genera” Framework is now called “Windows Identity Foundation” and is an extension for .NET
Windows CardSpace “Geneva” is now called “Windows CardSpace 2.0” and is the usage of WIF with CardSpace

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “5”

Identity Challenges

Custom Authentication
Grant Access to users at partner organizations
Mash up: single sign on across applications and across companies
Support browser, rich and mobile clients

Now using WIF and ADFS 2.0 in order to get the Challenges solved

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010

Identity Challenges

Identity Flow

Client
Web Server
App Server
Sharepoint Content
Back-End Web Services

Use Customer Identity Provider

Several Authentication Providers like

Integrated Authentication
ASP.NET Membership
Live ID
Custom Membership

Automatic & Secure identity delegation
Authorization over Application specific roles
“No-credential” access to WebService

Directions

Authorization - .NET ACS CTP

Claims-based, rules driven authorization for REST Web Services
Developed with Google and Yahoo

OAuth Web Resource Authorization Protocol (WRAP)
Simple Web Tokens (SWT)

Integrating with WIF and ADFS 2.0
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/dotnettservices

OpenID

Key part of the Identity Management System

50.000 destination sites
US Government sites to be OpenID enabled

Major portals are OpenID providers

Yahoo, Google

Challenges

Usability
Security
Client Software

‘M’ Model : System Identity

Allow more interesting queries in terms of security tracking

Very interesting topics and certainly to keep seeing more information about it.

PDC09 – Pre-Conference – Windows Bootcamp Part 8 – Multi-Touch

NunoGodinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:27:28 GMT

Architecture

Handled using a Driver Model that is implemented by the partners
Based on WM_Messages that are exchanged by the application and the Multi-touch Hardware

Development Tiers

Good

Everything that comes for free
APIs

Panning/Zoom gestures
Right-click Gestures

Native Win32

Controls with standard scrollbars

WPF4

Click Events
ScrollViewer

WinForms

Controls with standard scrollbars

Better

Using the API’s to get the application more interesting
Using the Microsoft Touch Pack

Best

Everything done before and even handle events that the Multi-touch supports

Coding with MultiTouch

Gestures

Native
.NET 4.0 / WPF
.NET 3.5

Raw Touch

Native
.NET 4.0 / WPF
Silverlght
.NET 3.5

Manipulation

Native
.NET 4.0 / WPF
.NET 3.5

Inertia

Native
.NET 4.0 / WPF
.NET 3.5

Gestures

One or two fingers “actions”
Pre-defined in the platform
On by default in Windows 7
Using WM_Gestures

Touch

Using WM_Touch
Similar to WM_Gestures but just a lot more of them
We need to opt-in to have Touch capabilities
In case of using Touch we won’t get Gestures any more, just Raw touch

Geneva Framework goes WIF – Windows Identity Foundation

NunoGodinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:41:31 GMT

Geneva Framework has received a name change and now is called WIF – Windows Identity Foundation, since is the technology that will work with all types of Identity in the Microsoft world.

“It provides developers pre-built .NET security logic for building claims-aware applications, enhancing either ASP.NET or WCF applications. Windows Identity Foundation makes it easeir to build richer, more secure applications (cloud and on-premise) without being a security and identity expert. It will boost developer productivity, as a result, and enhance app security through a standard approach to federation, strong authentication and identity delegation.”

I’ve made a simple wrap-up of the several interesting articles about WIF, and they are:

Listen about WIF on .NET Rocks
Download the RC of the WIF here.
Learn more about the Id Element.
Cool sample using WIF on FabrikamShipping application
Download the WIF RC Training Kit here
See Claims-Driven Modifier Control

“Simple ASP.NET server control which allows you to use identity for driving the behavior of your frontend UX, without requiring you to see even a single line of code”

Have good reading and tests with WIF

PDC09 – Pre-Conference – Windows Bootcamp Part 7 – Graphics Improvements in Windows 7

NunoGodinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:25:28 GMT

Windows 7 Usage of the GPU

Continues from Vista
- Media Center UI
- Video Playback
- Desktop Window Manager (DWM)
Win7 DWM uses DirectX3D10.1 API
- Scales in Performance all the way from low end integrated graphics cards to the highest level ones

Windows 7 High Color

Wider Gamur
- Bigger then sRGB, eg. xvYCC, AdobeRGB
Higher precision
Higher Dynamic Range
Windows 7 provides
- Color Calibration Tool
- Gamma LUT Loader

High DPI Displays are now Common

Improvements in Windows UI & IE
- Automatic Configuration in OOBE (Out-Of-Box-Experience)
- Promotion the Control Panel UI for DPI

Current Challengues

3D
- Uses DX3..10
- Challenges
  - Not always available
    - No Hardware
    - Server
- New in Win7
  - usage of DirectX10.1
2D
- Uses GDI, GDI+
- Challenges
  - Quality and Performance
- New in Win7
  - usage of Direct2D
Text
- GDI
- Challenges
  - Quality, Not up to date
- New in Win7
  - usage of DirectWrite
Imaging
- GDI, GDI, WIC+
- Challenges
  - Extensive Format
  - Support for Security
- New in Win7
  - new WIC version
Device Control
- GDI
- Challenges
  - Outdated notion of devices

Windows Azure TCO and ROI Calculator

NunoGodinho — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:30:51 GMT

One of the most asked questions about Windows Azure is what is the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and the ROI (Return of Investment) that we have in order to decide if we are going or not into the cloud.

Based on this questions Windows Azure Team putted together a TCO and ROI Calculator that will help you make your decisions better, and also plan how much are you going to spend in Windows Azure and Windows Azure Service Platform in order to maintain your business going. This is very important because even when having things going into the cloud our management still need some predictability on the costs and also some numbers to support the decision of moving to the cloud.

Start predicting and planning your TCO and ROI using this calculator here.

PDC09 – Pre-Conference – Windows Bootcamp Part 6/6 – Windows Sensors and Location

NunoGodinho — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:30:27 GMT

Sensor Platform Overview

Develop better and more productive user experiences

Enable environmentally adaptive user interface

Windows 7 features a unified API for working with sensors

No need to target vendor-specific APIs
Consistent interface for sensors, extensions for location
Access control and privacy

Sensor Platform Architecture

Applications
Sensor API
Sensor class extensions
UMDF Sensor Driver
Sensor Device

Sensor class extensions and Sensor API connect to the Location and Other sensors control panel

Privacy and Access Control

Sensor data is considered personal

User consent is required to share data

All sensors are disabled by default
Can be preconfigured per user/services
Administrator rights required to enabled a sensor

What is a Sensor?

Category and Type

Category, represents what is being sensed
Type, represents how it’s being sensed

Properties

Read-only (Model, Serial Number) or read-write (Report Interval)
Sensors may have custom properties

Data

Get sensor-specific data report object synchronously or asynchronously (recommended approach)

Events

State change, leave, data updated, other

State

Is sensor working properly? What is the problem?

Sensor API Architecture

Native/Win32 API

COM Based (includes sensorsapi.h and sensors.h)
Consist in the following interfaces

ISensorManager
ISensor
ISensorDataReport

Windows API CodePack

Managed class library to ease .NET Framework access to the Sensor and Location APIs

Location Platform

A single API call to answer. Where I am?

Enabled location based services
Adjust functionality based on location changes

Built on top of the sensor API

Automatic transition between providers (most accurate providers have priority)
Concurrent access for multiple applications

Managed Wrapper
In .NET 4 we’ll use the System.Devices namespace where this will be placed

PDC09 – Pre-Conference – Windows Bootcamp Part 5/6 – Windows 7 Libraries Integration

NunoGodinho — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:38:11 GMT

Overview

In previous versions of windows, users managed files in known folders locations

Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos

People store data “all over the place”

54% of digital content lives outside the user profile
Most uses do both
Store content on net work shares

Home Groups

Allows us to specify which folders make the library
“Libraries are declarations where users can find and organize data collected from multiple folders”

“Under the Hood”

Library is kept in a file

Important: Don’t work with the file

Libraries is similar to a folder but only look at the folders

Integrating with Libraries

Common File Dialog

When we save a file on a Library by default is going to be saved into the default save location defined in the Library configuration
The new Common file dialog have built-in support for Libraries
Win32

Use IFileDialog native APIs
Do not use GetOpenFileName and SaveFileName

Library APIs

Shell APIs are COM Bases
User the Library objects, interfaces and functions you should
To Load Library

IShellLibrary
LoadLibraryFromKnownFolder

Shell Helper Functions (ShHelper.h)
ShellLibrary Class in the Windows API CodePack for Managed Code
SLUtil.exe is a command-line tools that enables us to manage libraries

More samples here.

PDC09 – Pre-Conference – Windows Bootcamp Part 4/6 – Windows 7 Taskbar

NunoGodinho — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:59:52 GMT

Key Goals

Things you use all the time are at your fingerprints
Manage your windows with confidence
You are in control
Clean and lightweight

Coding for the Windows Taskbar

Win32/C++

iTaskbarList3
ICustomDestinationList
IShellItem
IShellLink

.NET

Windows API Codepack

Taskmanager
JumpList
JumpListItem

How are Windows Grouped?

ApplicationID

It’s a String, not a GUID

Limited to 128 characters
Naming Conventions – Company.Product.SubProduct

Design Considerations

Default: Computed by process name
Can be explicitly declared

Several executables, same application
Same executables (host), many applications
Multiple shortcuts

Setting the ApplicationID

Process-wide – affects all windows in the current process
C++

SetCurrentProcessExplicjtAppUserModelId(L”Microsoft.Samples.AppId1”)

.NET

TaskbarManager.SetCurrentProcessId(“Microsoft.Samples.AppId1”)

Taskbar Buttons

Consolidation

Quick launch
Notification area icon
Desktop shortcut
Running application Windows

Design Considerations

Only users can pin applications to taskbar
The icon’s hot-track color us the icon dominant color
Test icons with High DPI
Test with with various themes and glass colors

Get More from Taskbar Buttons

Overlay and Progress

Design considerations

Notification area is now user controlled

Leave yourself out if possible

Use taskbar buttons for custom progress or status information

Thumbnail toolbars

Design Considerations

You’ll get up to 7 buttons (hard-coded limit)

Once added, can’t delete
Can hide and disable

Behave as regular buttons

Listen to Events

RegisterWindowMessage
ThumbBarAddButton

.NET

AddButtoons(IntPtr windowHandle, params ThumbnailToolbarButton[]) – WindowsForms
AddButtons(UIElement element, params ThumbnailToolbarButton[]) – WPF

Live Thumbnails

Custom Window Switchers

Use ITaskbarList3::RegisterTab, SetTabOrder

Taskbar + Windows Shell

Application Support

Common file dialogs
Known folders and libraries
Property System

Terminology

IShellItem – represents folders and files
IShellLink – represents shell shortcuts
IShellFolder – represents folders

Jump List

It’s a mini Start Menu for the application

The user is in control of what is part of the Jump List

Detailed Look

Destination (nouns) – Items that will be worked

Pinned Category
Known Category

Only 2 Known category exist and mutually exclusive on the API

Recent
Frequent

Custom Category

Tasks (verbs) - Actions

User Tasks
Taskbar Tasks

Design Considerations

Surface key destinations and tasks

Recent and frequent are free
Pinned is also free (if the user uses it)
Respect items the user removes

PDC09 – Pre-Conference – Windows Bootcamp Part 3/6 - Working Set Background

NunoGodinho — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:51:39 GMT

Working Set Background

Optimal usage of system memory – a constant area of investment
Working set: Comprises all the potentially trimmable virtual addresses for a given process, session or system resource
Resources like nonpaged pool, kernel stacks, large pages & AWE regions are excluded
Working sets provide an efficient way for the system to make memory available under pressure … but maintaining them is nor free

Working Set Aging/Trimming

Are periodically aged to improve trim decisions
Which sets and which virtual addresses to trim?
How much to trim?
Memory events so applications can trim?

General Policies of Working Sets

How is optimal usage achieved?

Ordered based on their age distribution
Trim goal is set higher to avoid subsequent additional trimming
After the goal is meet other sets continue to be trimmed – bus just for their very old pages. This provides fairness so one process doesn’t surrender pages and the others not.
Up to 4 pages may be performed later passes consider higher percentages of each working set and lower ages (more recently accessed) as well
When trimming does occur, all sets are also aged so future trims have optimal aging

Working Set improvements

Expansion to 8 aging values
Keep exact age distribution counts instead of estimates
Force self-aging and trimming during rapid expansion
Don’t skip processes due to lock contention and ensure fair aging by removing pass limits
Separation of the system cache working set into 3 distinct working sets (system cache, paged pool and driver images)

Now we can apply minimums to each one making it more manageable and interesting

Factor in standby list repurposing when making age/trim decisions

Any pages that are reference by your application are immediately protected by the factor in the standby list

Improved inpage clustering of system addresses

RESULTS: Doubling of performance in memory constrained systems

PFN Lock Background

The Page Frame Number (PFN) array is virtually continuous (but can be physically sparse)
The Problem

The huge majority of virtual memory operations were synchronized via a single system-wide PFN lock.
Large number of processors and memory sizes identify the lock pressure. Prior to this change SQL Server had an 88% PFN lock contention rate on systems with 128 processors
Applications and device drivers seeking higher performance faced significance complexity at best

The Answer

In Windows 7 the system wide PFN lock was replaced with the fine-grained locking on an individual page basis
This completely eliminated the bottleneck, resulting in much higher scalability.

PDC09 – Pre-conference – Windows 7 Bootcamp Part 2/6 – Core Kernel Changes

NunoGodinho — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:51:39 GMT

More Core Platform Support

Supporting Mode than 64Lps
- Introduction of the Processor Groups
  - Windows Server 2008 R2 introduces processor Groups
    - Each processor groups can contain up to 64 LPs
    - System support up to 4 groups in this release
    - Maintains compatibility with legacy systems
Processes and Threads
- Processes can contain threads executing in multiple groups
- Processes are assigned groups in round robin fashion
- Threads are assigned to a group based on:
  - Inheritance from creating thread
  - Using new group affinity API
Task Based Scheduling
- Runtime support task based concurrency want to control when and where tasks execute
- Why not use kernel threads to represent tasks
  - Context switches between threads involve the kernel scheduler
  - Runtime loses control when blocking event occurs
UMS – User Mode Scheduling
- Enables switching between threads in user mode
- Returns control to the runtime when a thread blocks in the kernel
- Architecture
  - Divides threads into a user and kernel portion
    - Together these comprise a UMS Worker Thread
  - Creates to views of what is being made
  - When a Worker thread enters the kernel
    - porting of the Scheduler thread enters wait state
    - Worker thread wakes and executes kernel service
      - Ensures correct kernel state for the Worker Thread
The Dispatcher Lock
- Dispatcher database lock originally protected the integrity of all scheduler related data structures
- Over time additional locks introduced to reduce contention
  - Thread locks, timer table locks, PRCB locks
  - Still synchronizes
- Replaced in Windows 7 by Coarse-Grained lock
  - Well defined locking hierarchy
  - Per-object locking used for object paths
  - Many Operations are lock-free
  - Uses transactional semantics for waits

PDC09 – Pre-Conference - Windows 7 BootCamp Part 1/6 - Introduction

NunoGodinho — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:17:53 GMT

Introduction to the Windows 7 BootCamp

Key Windows Kernel Changes

Performance

Footprint reduction
Memory optimizations
Working set management improvements
Perftrack

Power efficiency

Core Parking

Trying to make cores going to sleep if they are not needed

Unified Background Process Manager
Timer Coalescing
Tick Skipping

Reliability

Fault Tolerant Heap
Process Reflection
Native VHD

Ability to mount and manage VHDs
Boot-from-VHD

Scalability

Simultaneous Multithreading Improvements
User Model Scheduling
Support for > 64 logical processors
Lock removal, including PFM, dispatcher locks

Security

New UAC operating models
Managed Service accounts

Allows a service to run isolated form other services

Bitlocker-to-go

Extends the previous versions in order to encrypt USB disks and we can use it in any other OS since it launches the Bitlocker-To-Go plugin in order to get access to the elements of the USB disks

Windows Biometric Framework
App Locker
Auditing improvements

New Object global auditing in order to get information about why the user has or doesn’t have access to same information

Entity Framework 4.0 News

NunoGodinho — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:05:50 GMT

In the last few days I’ve been seeing several element of the Entity Framework 4.0 that come with the .NET 4.0 and I there are several interesting news that I thought I could wrap up a little bit in this post, and so lets start with the news.

Providers made for version 3.5 will work unmodified
- Great news for all the ones that develop their own custom providers in order to work with Entity Framework, and of course a nice information to know that the provider model is not being changed on this version.
- In order to know more about the several changes read here.

New CTP for the ADO.NET Entity Framework Features that work with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 version
- Interesting news since in some cases we needed this in order to continue working with features like Self-Tracking Entities, and some new stuff is also here, like enhancements in the Code-Only EF model, in terms of:
  - Fine grained control over the model
    - Specify Navigation Properties inversed
    - Property Facets
    - Complex types
  - Customizing Mappings
    - Change Table and Column Names
    - Custom inheritance
    - Entity Splitting
    - Joining Table Mapping
- Read more here

Model First with Entity Framework
- Now we can develop our EF model first and even extend the Database Generation Workflow and DDL generation Template.
  - This is very important and shows how this EF version is extensible and lets us define what we want to happen, and how it will happen, and this is a great power for the ones that are using EF or using other ORM technologies and need more power into their models.
  - Uses WF 4.0 as the way to provide extensibility for the Data Generations. Very interesting indeed.
- A very good post of the PM of the Entity Designer of the EF, Noam Ben-Ami here.

Foreign Key Relationships
- This has always been a challenge with the different ORM technologies that I’ve used, and in the EF 4.0 a lot is being change, from using Implicit Associations to Explicit Associations.
  - “In .NET 4.0 we’ve added support for FK Properties and FK Associations to the Entity Framework. It’s still possible to use Independent Associations and the two can be mixed in models. We’re excited to offer FK Associations because they simplify many common Entity Framework coding tasks. Hopefully this walkthrough has given you a feel for how you can use FK Associations and Properties.”
- Read more about this here.

Automatic Generation of Stored Procedures Return Types
- Sometimes we need for a stored procedure to return several values, like a table, and in order to make this easier the EF team decided to provide a way to easily return a collection of complex types from Stored Procedures, and so in this new version the designer allows us to define with type of results the Store Procedure will return and then it will generate the need type on the Database.
- Very interesting also, read more here.

Walkthroughs about Code-Only and Self-Tracking Entities.

Hope this helps you knowing a little more about Entity Framework 4.0 and where to find more information’s.