EDRA v1.1 Final Release

The new EDRA (codenamed Shadowfax) v1.1 RTM is out on the street. You can download it form the Gotdotnet workspace (membership required). This version incorporates feedback from customers and external reviewers based on the EDRA version 1.0 community release.

This version has improvements in the following areas:

      ● Tooling & Wizards

      ● New & Enhanced Handlers

      ● Better Configuration Support

      ● Performance gains in specific areas

The main new features that you will find are here:

● Wizards. The following wizards are included:

● Create New Solution. This wizard helps you create a new solution with the

EDAF code base.

● Add Business Action. This wizard helps you add a business action to a project

in your EDAF solution.

● Expose Service Action on a Transport. This wizard helps you expose the

business action on one of the available transports: InProc, Message Queuing,

Remoting, or Web service.

● In-Proc Service Interface. Allows the pipeline and handlers to be executed in the

same process as the host environment.

● TokenAuthentication handler. Used for custom authentication scenarios; allows

the first authentication to occur using a user name and password, and then the

handler issues a high-entropy token that can be used for authentication on

subsequent Web service requests.

● DuplicateMessage handler. In addition to existing functionality, added a

configurable reject mode to the handler to allow duplicate messages to be rejected.

● Additional runtime configuration validation. Moved logic from the external

configuration validation utility into the runtime so that as a configuration file is

modified, validation will automatically occur.

● Configure exception shielding. Added a configurable mode so that exception

shielding can be enabled or disabled. Exception shielding is a helpful feature for

production environments where an exception should not provide the client with

internal information (such as a connection string). During development and

testing however, it is useful to see the exceptions that are raised.

● Improve Performance. The following areas have been tuned to increase

performance:

● SyntacticValidation handler by caching the XSD and compiling it after loading.

● DCOM dispatching transport by creating a proxy pool.

● WebService interface transport by optimizing stream handling.

● Binary Application Template Solution. Can be used to demonstrate how the

EDAF could be deployed and used within a large organization after EDAF has

been customized to meet your requirements. The template references the binaries

instead of the EDRA source code projects. This makes the resulting Visual Studio

solution easier to develop with because the solution is easier to navigate and it

reduces compile time.

● Visual Basic .NET Application Template Solution. Can be used as a starting

point for creating applications in Visual Basic .NET. The template still references

the EDRA framework’s Visual C# .NET projects.

● Visual Basic .NET Code Snippets included in the documentation. You can use

these snippets with the Visual Basic .NET Application Template Solution and

while you step through the Tutorial and the Developer’s Guide.

● WSE Support. Explains different ways of configuring the service interface with

Web Services Enhancements 2.0 for Microsoft .NET (WSE).

● Bug Fixes. Bug and known issue fixes as reported on the Wiki and the workspace along with feedback from customers.

You may provide feedback contacting to devfdbck@microsoft.com as well so you might be able to drive the future versions of EDRA along with the patterns & practices team.