April 2008 Entries

I just wanted to link to this great post on Silverlight 2's layout and rendering features. Both features borrow heavily from WPF, but there are also important differences. For one, unlike WPF, there is only one tree... no Logical vs. Visual. Also very cool mention of Silverlight 2's rendering internals being many-core friendly so it scales well on the CPU. Big difference from WPF where rendering is offloaded to the GPU.

posted Monday, April 14, 2008 4:58 PM | Comments | Filed Under [ .NET WinFx/Vista ]

I sat in on a very informative roundtable discussion about WCF tips, tricks and pitfalls this afternoon here at the MVP conference. In that discussion one of the topics that came up was load balancing. After some brief discussion, I chimed in with a pitfall that people would need to watch out for which is that, if they're using something like a BIG-IP box from F5, which proxies SSL communication for them, they will have problems getting their message credentials to flow through to the actual web server since communication between the F5 and the web server is done over just plain HTTP. After I finished talking, people were asking for more detail and whether or not I had written something up on the topic. I thought maybe I never ended up writing anything, but it turns out I did! So for those MVPs who are probably here looking for that info now, or for anyone else who might have missed it, here's a link that write up.

Also, I mentioned it in the original article, but I again wanted to give credit to Pedro Felix because he was a big help in guiding me down the right path to get this all implemented originally. I finally met Pedro today after he recognized the topic and my URL in the roundtable discussion. Thanks again Pedro, nice to finally put a face to the name!

posted Monday, April 14, 2008 4:19 PM | Comments | Filed Under [ .NET Web Services ]

Alright, I'm reaching out via my blog for anyone in the NYC area who has strong experience writing web services and wants to join an awesome team, using awesome, bleeding edge technology to develop an enterprise level API for Mimeo.

Skills required:

  • At least 5 years programming with C# and .NET
    • Must understand .NET 2.0 concepts such as generics, anonymous methods, etc.
  • Strong understanding of and production experience with WCF
    • Must be able to explain the ABCs
    • Must understand security features
  • Familiar with the concept of an Enterprise Service Bus
  • Understanding of web service standards such as:
    • SAML
    • WSDL
    • WS-*
      • Addressing
      • Trust
      • Atomic Transaction (implies Coordination)
      • Eventing
    • Strong understanding of asynchronous programming patterns in .NET

Skills desired:

  • Experience with .NET 3.5
    • LINQ
    • Latest WCF enhancements
  • Experience with O/R mapping frameworks (ADO.NET Entities a big plus)
  • Experience with caching (MemCache a big plus)
  • Experience with parallel programming (ParalellFx a big plus)

If you think you fit the bill and want to join the team, drop our HR department a line and reference this posting so they know exactly what job you're interested in. For more about Mimeo, check out our "About Us" page.

posted Monday, April 14, 2008 8:54 AM | Comments | Filed Under [ Web Services ]

I'm sitting in JFK waiting for my flight to Seattle to depart as I head to this year's MVP Summit. The MVP Summit is always an interesting event. Sometimes there's some new tech revealed, but it's not like a PDC. Mostly it's about networking and providing feedback to Microsoft on what they could be doing better based on our experience in the field. Either way, it's always worth the trip and, as always, I'm looking forward to it.

posted Sunday, April 13, 2008 12:50 PM | Comments | Filed Under [ Personal ]