Adnan Masood's Weblog! عدنان مسعود

“The Web Service Software Factory (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance. It is designed to help you quickly and consistently construct WCF and ASMX Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns.”
- Excerpt from MSDN, Web Services Software factory

 
I gave a talk on Web Service software factory in the SoCal Rock and Roll code camp  this afternoon. It was well received (at least I am under this impression since there was nothing thrown at me, ok yes, one tomato, big deal!) and following are the links to the WCF resources discussed.

• Web Service Software Factory Known Issues
• Service Factory Community
• Web Service Software Factory – Patterns and Practices
• Web Service Software Factory – Videos (Highly Recommended)
• Service Factory Hands on Lab (Both for ASMX and WCF)
• Web Service Security Guide

 

Yesterday I attended an informative MSDN event in Ontario, California on CardSpace, AJAX Client Library and AJAX best practices. Lynn Langit did an excellent job explaining the concepts and basic implementation details. Even though it wasn't intended towards intermediate/advance developers, it's a good refresher if you are not actively using these technologies or want to get familiar with the topics more before you start. Hey, where else can you hear all the buzz words like Hijax!

Further details and goodies can be downloaded from Lynn's blog

Check for more MSDN Events in your area.

Goodbye wires…

MIT team experimentally demonstrates wireless power transfer, potentially useful for powering laptops, cell phones without cords

Franklin Hadley, Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies
June 7, 2007

Imagine a future in which wireless power transfer is feasible: cell phones, household robots, mp3 players, laptop computers and other portable electronics capable of charging themselves without ever being plugged in, freeing us from that final, ubiquitous power wire. Some of these devices might not even need their bulky batteries to operate.

A team from MIT's Department of Physics, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) has experimentally demonstrated an important step toward accomplishing this vision of the future.

More here http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wireless-0607.html

Just finished watching "The World's Fastest Indian" and loved the quote.

"It's not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or when the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worth cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat. "

-Theodore Roosevelt

Dawn is Pakistan's Largest and most widely circulated English language newspaper. With excellent reporting and contents, this is one of my many reads as a self proclaimed news junkie. Oddly enough, for some reason they never published an RSS feed for the paper so I (and I'm sure other readers) had no way of reading it via our beloved Google Reader (insert any other RSS Reader here). So I decided to publish one for them until they get one together. Following is the link to subscribe to the RSS Feed. 

It is completely non commercial feed and for news reading purposes only. All contents are copyrighted to Dawn Group of Newspapers.

A very cool tool, Gapminder is defined as "taking information that’s “dry as dust” and making it visible through animation. Making sense of the world by having fun with statistics!"

http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

GapMinder - Google Tech Talk

Google has a knack for statistics so they bought it. A list of what Google bought in the past 12 months
by Jon Brodkin, Network World. Thanks to Jeff for the link.

And While we are at it, check out the cool singular value decomposition implementation along with graphs and charts for netflix challenge, based on Simon Funk's algos at Timely Development. Source Code Included!

Last but not least, Minority report coming to life, Microsoft Surface

I’ll be speaking at Santa Barbara .NET Users Group on June 13th at 6pm. The topic of my presentation is Windows Communication Foundation. Further details of the meeting can be found here.

http://www.sbdotnetug.org/

Presentation Abstract

Windows Communication Foundation is Microsoft's Unified Programming Model which allows us to build secure, reliable, transacted, and interoperable distributed applications. WCF integrates the distributed computing paradigms such as ASP.NET Web Services, .NET remoting, and Enterprise Services and provides a unified model for connected system development

This session on WCF will cover the basics of WCF Architecture, the concept of messaging end points and the supported communication protocols. After a brief review of existing connected systems technologies such as asmx and remoting, we will talk about channels, messages, data and operation contracts, bindings, service hosting techniques and communication security offered by WCF. The intent of this presentation is to provide hands on technical overview of WCF, showing audience how they can build their very own WCF services and client application from scratch. Time permitting, audience will be able to participate in intermediate topics such as ASMX to WCF migration strategies, best practices, service oriented architecture and web service factory WCF support.