Pablo M. Cibraro (aka Cibrax)

The new WCF Web Apis Preview 4 released yesterday in the wcf.codeplex.com introduced a new extensibility point for intercepting messages at channel level. The name for this new feature is “Http Message Channels” and the good thing is that you don’t need to rely anymore on the REST Starter Kit request interceptors for doing the same thing. Actually, a Http Message Channel is more useful as you can intercept either request or response messages, and also you get an Http message with all the context information you might need and not a WCF generic message, which usually requires some additional processing.

In this last post, I showed how the new WCF Web Apis could be integrated with AppFabric for pushing custom events to the AppFabric tracking database. A great thing about the monitoring infrastructure in AppFabric is that is uses ETW as mechanism for publishing the events, so your services are not hitting the database directly with all the performance penalties that database calls imply.  

There is no doubt that the MVVM pattern offers a clean separation of concern for building testable user interfaces with WPF and Silverlight.  This pattern relies on the data binding support in those two technologies for mapping an existing model class (the view model) to the different parts of the UI or view.

One of the key aspects of how the web works today is content negotiation. The idea of content negotiation is based on the fact that a single resource can have multiple representations, so user agents (or clients) and servers can work together to chose one of them.

I happy to announce today a new addition to our SO-Aware service repository toolset, SO-Aware Test Workbench, a WPF desktop application for doing functional and load testing against existing WCF Services.

The other day, Ron Jacobs made public a template in the Visual Studio Gallery for enabling monitoring capabilities to any existing WCF Http service hosted in Windows AppFabric. I thought it would be a cool idea to reuse some of that for doing the same thing on the new WCF Web Http stack.

About this time last year, I wrote a couple of posts about how to use the “Interceptors” from the REST starker kit for implementing several authentication mechanisms like “SAML”, “Basic Authentication” or “OAuth” in the WCF Web programming model. The things have changed a lot since then, and Glenn finally put on our hands a new version of the Web programming model that deserves some attention and I believe will help us a lot to build more Http oriented services in the .NET stack. What you can get today from wcf.codeplex.com is a preview with some cool features like Http Processors (which I already discussed here), a new and improved version of the HttpClient library, Dependency injection and better TDD support among others.

We have introduced a new Visual Studio tool called “Service Explorer” as part of the new SO-Aware SDK version 1.3 to help developers to configure and export any regular WCF service into the SO-Aware service repository.