WCF is a framework for building service-oriented applications.  The flexibility of the framework makes it very powerful, but that power requires some wisdom in the implementation.  In this post, there will not be many answers, but I hope to help you determine what questions to ask.

Sharing assemblies between the server and the client

Many developers like to do things such as override ToString().  Not surprisingly, that code will not survive being sent over WCF.  It is…

Last week we made the basic WCF service, based on the template from VS2010.  A set of defaults that can be built on.  To make your own service, the assumption would be to make another interface, implement it, and then copy the app.config.  For the most part, that is correct.  What is less obvious is where those values come from, and what do they mean.  This week we will create our own service, and modify the app.config to expose it.  Everything we will do this week builds on the project from…

Windows Communication Foundation is a framework for building service-oriented applications.  Over the next several weeks, I intend to write about WCF and share some of my experience working with it.  This specific post covers a very simple getting started scenario.  It does not assume you know anything about WCF, or have ever seen it before.  It is a step-by-step guide to creating a service and a test case for it.  I do assume that you have a version of VS2010 that includes the test…

MVC, MVP, and MVVM are some of the common patterns to guide programmers toward creating decoupled solutions.  Learning about these is not a trivial task, picking the one that is best for a specific problem is a challenge, and implementing it correctly based on the descriptions I found on the internet would be even more challenging.  I have gone back and pulled out the earliest references I could find to these patterns for the definitions and explanations, but then put them in a modern…

This post will touch on several topics about app.config files.  The primary point of the posting is to provide sample code for a winforms application that will run in multiple environments.  In the case of this example: dev, test, uat, and production.  The code provided has been useful for a specific class of problems however there is a very great amount of capability in the configuration system and it is important to at least be aware of it.  In the quest to do things right, knowing…

The topics I have been selecting to write about are a reflection of things that have come up over the previous week.  The topic this week is logging.  Logging is an extremely valuable tool when developing and debugging software.  It can make the difference between a thirty second scan of a text file and several hours of debugging.  Given the importance of logging there have been at least a few attempts at creating logging applications.  Log4xxx type loggers have tons of neat features.  As…

Here is the Wikipedia definition of DRY:

In software engineering, Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) is a principle of software development aimed at reducing repetition of information of all kinds, especially useful in multi-tier architectures. The DRY principle is stated as "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." The principle has been formulated by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas in their book The Pragmatic Programmer. They…

I am faced with a difficult challenge. I have very strong views on what constitutes a well written set of code, those views are almost always different from what people I work with believe.

While I acknowledge that many people here have as much or more experience, and that are as convinced of their own correctness as much as I - I wish to share different interpretations to what many consider "the right way".

The right way – just the implications are arrogant.  Who is to say…