Christian Weyer's Blog

1st real test from Windows Live Writer to new blog engine – did it work?

Dear reader, please say: “Yes, it worked. I can see your blog post” – and the best thing is: you should not have to change anything.
It should *just work* with thinktecture’s blogs now being hosted on TypePad. Permanent redirects, same URLs as before, especially the feed URL. Pure joy – good work Ingo – and thanks!

A picture:

Some source code:

public static bool ConfigureRelayEndpoints(ServiceHost host)
{
    bool relayAvailable;
    ServiceEndpoint[] endpoints = new ServiceEndpoint[host.Description.Endpoints.Count];
    host.Description.Endpoints.CopyTo(endpoints, 0);
    List<ServiceEndpoint> endpointList = new List<ServiceEndpoint>(endpoints);
    List<ServiceEndpoint> relayedEndpoints = endpointList.FindAll(
        e => IsRelayBinding(e));
    relayAvailable = IsRelayReachable();
    if (TecTeacherConfigurationSection.MediaServiceSection.ServiceBus.Enabled && relayAvailable)
    {
        foreach (var relayedEndpoint in relayedEndpoints)
        {
            ServiceRegistrySettings sr;
            if (TecTeacherConfigurationSection.MediaServiceSection.ServiceBus.AdvertizeFeed)
                sr = new ServiceRegistrySettings(DiscoveryType.Public);
            else
                sr = new ServiceRegistrySettings(DiscoveryType.Private);
            relayedEndpoint.Behaviors.Add(sr);
        }
    }
    else
    {
        foreach (var relayedEndpoint in relayedEndpoints)
        {
            host.Description.Endpoints.Remove(relayedEndpoint);
        }
    }
    return relayAvailable;
}

Finally, a decent way to blog… cross fingers to see more here

WIF-based applications in the wild - Dominick Baier and Christian Weyer on .NET Rocks!

In part three of .NET Rocks' virtual three part series on all things identity, claims and WIF, Dominick and I are talking about using and applying the Windows Identity Foundation and ADFSv2 in the wild, beyond the Hello Claim levels being covered elsewhere.
This interview contains a number a small tidbits gathered from several customer projects.

Hope you enjoy it - and feel free to get in touch with us when you need help in this new but exciting world.
Weyer and Baier on WIF

Your identity, my identity - our identity! thinktecture rocks you with claims & more

Dominick managed to update all our thinktecture official identity bits and pieces to the recent WIF RC.

• Starter STS 0.95RC
• StarterRP 0.95RC
• thinktecture.IdentityModel 0.5RC

Go and get it while it's hot!

And: if you need help with your identity management and claims-based security scenarios: we are ready for hiring (in 2010...) :)

WCF4 Beta 2 demos from TechEd Europe session

First, thanks to everybody who came to my session. It was Monday. It was 9.00 a.m. - yikes! :)

As promised, here are the samples:
Download WCF B2 samples from TechEd Europe

See you next time.

Helpful for everybody, complex for many - explained comprehensibly: Claims-based security with WIF

thinktecture's security guru Dominick Baier is unbeaten at explaining complex matters in the security world in a simple yet effective way.
So this happend again in a recent Channel9 video recorded by German Microsoft evangelist Dariusz Parys. Dominick presents facts in the realm of claims-based security and how to solve different problems related to authentication, authorization and personalization in practice.
Beyond all the theory and standards, he mentions our very own StarterSTS which was designed and built to lower the entry bar into the sometimes not too trivial battle field of security token services and relying parties. And all this is based on the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) - the prime API for .NET developers to solve the said identity management problems.

Let's go and watch!

Creating a database in SQL Azure (aka 'provisioning')

People do not always want to rely on UIs to do database jobs.
At a command prompt with SQLCMD in the path type the following:

SQLCMD –U [MyUsername]@[MyServername] –P [MyPassword] –S [MyServername].database.windows.net –d master
CREATE DATABASE [MyDatabaseName]
GO

So, nothing spectacular - just for the records.

Hilfreich für alle, komplex für viele, verständlich erklärt: Claims-basierte Sicherheit mit WIF

thinktecture's Sicherheits-Guru Dominick Baier versteht es immer wieder, komplexe Sachverhalte im Security-Umfeld einfach aber effektiv darzulegen.
So auch wieder geschehen im Channel9-Video, welches Dariusz Parys von Microsoft Deutschland mit ihm gedreht hat. Dominick erklärt die Sachverhalte im Umfeld von Claims-basierter Sicherheit und wie man damit Probleme rund um Authentifizierung, Autorisierung und auch Personalisierung in der Praxis lösen kann.
Neben all der Theorie wird auch unser StarterSTS erwähnt, der den Eintieg in die Claims-Welt erleichtern und den scheinbaren Schrecken vor Identity Providern und Relying Parties nehmen soll. Und alles auf Basis der Windows Identity Foundation (WIF).

Auf zum Video!

Writing T4 templates? Ease your pain with Tangible's T4 Editor

The more I play around with T4 templates in Visual Studio, the more I like them ('like' as an: they help me to solve problems, but I do not love them).
But yes, they are kind of awkward, like classic ASP programming the other day... and Microsoft doesn't help us a lot in not providing any explicit VS development experience for T4. There is no syntax coloring/highlighting, no intellisense - nothing. Just a plain text view - this makes Visual Studio equal to... well, Notepad :)

This is the reason why there are some commercially available T4 editors. The one I am using since a few months is tangible's T4 Editor.

These guys over at tangible are quite bright and - even more important - quite community-oriented guys. They have a super-fast response time when you have questions, problems, bug reports.
This is basically why I chose them. I like the editor and it makes my T4 life much easier, and they help me immediately when something doesn't work.

MSDN Magazine: Contract-First Web Services - Schema-based Development with Windows Communication Foundation

Buddhike and I wrote a small overview article on why contract-first and especially how contract-first.

For the how we focus on WCF, the built-in support in Visual Studio and the command tools. Then move on to show some basic first steps to do schema-based contract-first with WSCF.blue.
Enjoy.

RELEASE: WSCF.blue v1.0

Get it while it's hot.
In July we announced the Beta 1 and now we can give you the first released version of the number one Web Services Contract-First tool for WCF.

Notable features in WSCF.blue v1.0:

• A WSDL Wizard that allows the developer to step through the creation of a WSDL from one or more XSDs.
• A Data Contract Generator (similar to XSD.exe, XSDObjectGen.exe and SvcUtil.exe) that generates the .NET equivalent classes of the XSD types.
• A Service/Endpoint Stub (support for self-hosted and web-hosted) Generator and
• A Client Proxy Generator.
• A Generate Data Contract Code feature that supports the selection of multiple XSD/WSDL source files.
• A Paste XML as Schema option that generates a schema for a block of XML in the clipboard.
• Support for C# and VB.NET code generation.
• You can choose if operation methods on your service class will throw a NotImplementedException, call an implementation method in a partial class, or will be defined as abstract methods.
• Force the SOAP actions (Action and ReplyAction) applied to each operation contract follow the standard WCF format
• Errors found while processing the WSDL are reported in a WSCF.blue pane in the Visual Studio Output window.

Thanks for all the hard work to the team - especially the new WSCF.blue code master, Alex Meyer-Gleaves!
On to planning v2 now...