CloudCasts Blog

Creating Custom Activities in WF 4.0 Webcasts

Alan Smith — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:07:58 GMT

I’ve added the first two of a series of webcasts looking at creating custom activities in WF 4.0. The first one looks at deriving from the CodeActivity class to create simple activities, and the second looks at deriving from the AsyncCodeActivity (and being more friendly to the workflow runtime).

WF 4.0 Custom Activities Part 1 Code Activity

WF 4 Custom Activities Part 2 Asynchronous Code Activity

Two New AppFabric Related Webcasts

Alan Smith — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:14:43 GMT

I’ve added two new webcasts to CloudCasts looking at the two different parts of AppFabric (server and cloud).

Brian Loesgen takes a look at “Extending a BizTalk ESB On-Ramp into the Cloud” using the Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus.

I run though an “Introduction to Windows Server AppFabric Caching” using the Windows Server AppFabric (formally codename “Velocity”).

Webcast - Introduction to WCF Workflow Services

Alan Smith — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:38:54 GMT

I just added a new webcast “Introduction to WCF Workflow Services” to CloudCasts. I’ve been playting around with WCF and WF in .NET 4.0 and AppFabric for a while now, and will get into the habit of releasing webcasts every week or so. (Well that’s the new year’s resolution anyway…)

The webcast is here.

Interview Webcasts from PDC09

Alan Smith — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:30:16 GMT

Tibi has delivered another round of intervenes with some of the presenters at PDC. Vittorio Bertocci, Sara Ford, Ted Malone, Brad Abrams, Ade Miller and Don Box shared their ideas on the latest and greatest technology, and also their visions of the future.

Tibi also interviewed Jon Flanders and Paula Januszkievicz at TechEd in Berlin.

The interviews are here.

Update: It seems there is a permissions issue with Azure Storage Tables at the moment, so you get an error when you try to view videos. Hopefuly this will be resolved soon.

Update: I've fixed the site, the issue was a data center migration making the tables read only, another late night ahead migrating the data and blobs. Life's a riot on the bleading edge :-)

Alan

Who Moved my Cloud?

Alan Smith — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:44:54 GMT

Due to technical issues, (well, me not reading my hotmail account or any Azure blogs actually) I had a slight “outage” on CloudCasts. The USA-Northwest Azure data centres closed, taking my site with it. After a frantic couple of hours (midnight to 2 AM Swedish time) I’m back up and running in a shiny new data centre in USA-Southwest.

The site is now running again at www.cloudcasts.net, but due to the change in the Azure app name, links to cloudtv.cloudapp.net are broken. At the moment I am seeing a big drop off in traffic, so I’m guessing there are a lot of links to the old URLs. If you have linked to the site using cloudtv.cloudapp.net, it would be great if you can update it.

As the old saying goes, developers make the worst administrators.

Interviews at ØreDev and Ze Frank!

Alan Smith — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:31:28 GMT

Tibi and I are winding down after a hectic few days at the ØreDev conference in Sweden. It was a great conference, with a lot of international speakers and attendees, and a good mix of technologies and tracks. One of the highlights was Ze Frank, who was delivering his stand up comedy routine, which was targeted just right for the attendees.

I laid down the gauntlet to Tibi by challenging him to get an interview with Ze, and he accepted and delivered the goods, thanks to Herbjörn Wilhelmsen for chatting with Ze to arrange it. We managed to get a slightly longer “5 Minutes With” interview in which Ze turned the tables on Tibi and asked him questions about conquering a fear of flying and his attitude for dealing with the challenges life can throw at us. It’s very refreshing to have an interview without any three-letter-acronyms.

CloudCasts has also had a busy week, as I’ve posted interviews with Scott Hanselmam, Scott Allen, Julie Lerman, Herbjörn Wilhelmsen and Magnus Mårtensson. We even added some music to the site with a splendid rendition of “The Joker” by Carl Franklin, with Shawn Wildermoth providing the guitar solo. If you are ever in Malmö, I recommend the “The Bishops Arms”, though we could not decide if we should have 8 or 10 Bishops Fingers there. I have another few videos in the can, and will be getting them uploaded over the weekend.

Overall ØreDev 2009 was a great success, big credit to Michael Tiberg for his organization skills and his passion for the event; I’m looking forward to ØreDev 2010 already.

You can see all the ØreDev content here.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Flowchart Workflow Designer Video

Alan Smith — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:32:05 GMT

I’ve just posted the second in a series of webcasts looking at Workflow Foundation 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. This time the flowchart workflow designer takes centre stage, and I use it to build a basic workflow for the flight check-in process at an airport. I also make a few calls to a WCF service from the workflow using the new messaging activities, I’m going to focus on those next and hopefully get another webcast out very soon. Stay tuned...

The webcast is here.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Workflow Designer Webcast

Alan Smith — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:19:44 GMT

As the public launch of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is probably old news in the BlogSphere by now, I thought I’d try and get an early webcast out. I spent about an hour playing with the new Workflow Foundation (WF) designer, and have to say it’s looking pretty good.

I didn’t think that much of it in the PDC bits or Beta 1, but both the Sequential and Flowchart workflow designers are now very nice to develop with. I’ve not has the chance to look at any complex problems or do any heavy lifting with them, but so far they are impressive.

I have a short webcast looking at the new designer, using sequential and flowchart workflows, and a simple custom activity.

The webcast is here.

Tibi interviews the stars at DevReach in Bulgaria

Alan Smith — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:08:28 GMT

Tiberiu “Tibi” Covaci, the CloudCasts international correspondent was in Bulgaria last week for the DevReach 2009 conference. During a hectic few days he managed to pin down some of the main presenters and technology influencers for his “Five Minutes With…” interview series.

The interviews with Chris Sells, Richard Campbell, Christian Weyer and Carl Franklin have been published with four more to be released later this week. Tibi will also be at TechEd Berlin, OreDev in Malmoe and PDC in Los Angeles, so we can expect to see more of the same over the next few weeks.

The interviews are available on CloudCasts.

If you have any interviews of your own that you would like hosted on CloudCasts, or you would like to spend “Five Minutes with Tibi”, please contact me through this blog.

Two New Contributors to Cloud Casts, Five new Webcasts

Alan Smith — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:54:39 GMT

CloudCasts welcomes Tiberiu “Tibi” Covaci and Zaashan Shan as new contributors to the site. I’ve also added an “Interviews” section with my Brian Loesgen interview from Bloggers Guides and an interview with John Callaway. I also was the first to take part in Tibi’s first of a series of “Five Munites With...” series.

Tibi is in Bulgaria at the DevReach conference, hopefully there should be some more interviews soon.

CloudCasts Behind the Scenes Part 1 - Development and Deployment

Alan Smith — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 13:10:12 GMT

I’ve just published a “Behind the Scenes” webcasts on CloudCasts. It’s the first in a series of webcasts that will look at the project and how it is developed, tested, and hosted in Windows Azure.

In this webcast I’ll run through the deployment of a new version of the CloudCasts website. I’ll start by showing the project structure and how I have configures the application to use local or cloud based storage in the development phase. I’ll give you a few tips on hosting your Azure applications in IIS to speed up development. I’ll then run through the deployment of the new version of the site to a staging environment, and finally taking it into production.

The webcast is here.

Two More Contributors on CloudCasts

Alan Smith — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 09:57:33 GMT

I’ve just added two more webcasts to the “BizTalk Light and Easy” series, with a webcast on the HL7 Accelerator from Mark Brimble and the WCF-Oracle adapter from Miguel Herrera. It’s great to see good coverage of some of the less mainstream bits of BizTalk Server, very useful to have if you are working with it in a project.

www.CloudCasts.net

You can also follow CloucCasts on Twitter: http://twitter.com/CloudCasts

Webcast on WS-ReliableMessaging in WCF

Alan Smith — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:36:24 GMT

I’ve added a new webcast on http://www.cloudcasts.net.

This webcast shows how the WS-ReliableMessaging standard can be used in WCF to increase the reliability of message transmission across unreliable transports. The Fiddler tool will be used to examine how WCF creates a reliable session, and how messages and message acknowledgements are transmitted across the wire. The effects of blocking messages will be examined with reliable messaging turned off and on, and with the ordered delivery options enabled and disabled.

Get it here.

CloudCasts Update

Alan Smith — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:19:40 GMT

I’ve spent a bit of time with CloudCasts (formally Cloud TV). I changed the name for a couple of reasons, primarily because the domain name cloudcasts.net was available. I’m still hosting in Azure, and the original links will work as long as its Azure hosted, but you should update the links to use www.cloudcasts.net so they don’t break if I move it to another platform.

I’ve added a couple of new webcasts, Visual Studio 2010 WCF Project Templates and Book Review - SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009 (great book by the way). The book review is an experiment, if it’s popular I will maybe do some more. (If you would like me to review any books, please contact me. I make a point of reading most of the book before doing the review, so the throughput will probably be about one per month.)

I’m still on the lookout for new contributors, so if you want to have a go, grab a copy of Camtasia (there’s a 30 day full featured free trial version which should allow you to get a few webcasts done). Try to keep them to around 20 minutes, (the limit of the average developer attention span :-), you can always do a few short ones instead of one long one. Please contact me if you have anything to add, the update functionality on the site is not too hot.

Five New Webcasts on Cloud TV

Alan Smith — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:16:21 GMT

I’ve just added a few webcasts to Cloud TV:

· WCF - Windows Authentication

· Transactions and Compensation

· Creating a Highly Available BTS 09 Environment

· All you need to know about the SAP Adapter

· All you need to know about the SQL Adapter

Thanks to Mick Badran and the other “Light and Easy” BizTalk guys.

The site is here.

Please let me know via the contact form if you have any webcasts you would like me to add.