Blogs @ IRM

Since we are developing a product, we need to support both Windows authentication (for most installations), and Forms Authentication for smaller installations or cases where the customer does not use Active Directory for whatever reason. A design goal we had for this was to only change the needed configuration in one place, and that ended up being ...

… is the title of a great post by Vibro that can be found here. This is an important subject and in all project where I have used claims and STS I also wanted the claims on the client. When cracking my own STS (before WIF) I always used the display token to get them from the identity provider (IP, aka the STS) so that seems to be in the line with ...

This is the third post in a series of X. Read the first one here about out overall design and the second one here about localizing the UI. After doing some basic work on our repositories we wanted to create a Unit of Work implementation that would call SaveChanges on our EF ObjectContext and also commit the transaction if one is used. The problem ...

I’m helping a software development company to “convert” a VB6 application to .NET. We have a very tight schedule and originally planned to do a convert with some help from the Conversion Wizard and some parts manually, but still close to their current version. The goal was to just get over to .NET and from there develop the product that they and ...

Lately I’ve been using Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) in Windows Forms application with great success. I really like using this pattern because it has made me getting even more code out of the View and into the ViewModel instead. One reason for this I believe, is that the ViewModel has no reference to the View and this forces me to have better ...

I can't say that I'm impressed by LINQ to SQL, rather the oposite and I have bloged about problems before. Now it is time for more. Bad Generated Code The tables that have foregin key relationsships between them will result in objects, which have both an key-column (typical OtherObjectId) and a property that references the other object ...

One of the first results delivered from pattern & practices was the Application Architecture Guide, and if I remember correctly that was back in 2002 or 2003. That's a long time ago considering the speed in which .NET Framework and related technologies has progressed and also the big focus shifts in many areas like project methodolgy, DDD vs ...

We, as developers, must begin to use more asynchronous thinking when we develop applications. Processors don't get any faster, they just gets more cores that can do more work simultaneously, but that is no good for us if we don’t use it. Microsoft is for example working on ParallelFX, which probably will be included in .NET 4.0. There is ...

The scenario is a classic tiered solution with for example a client making a server-side call by using WCF. So waht's the problem with this common scenario if you choose to use LINQ to SQL? The problem is that the change tracking infrastructure reside on the server and therefor will not detect any changes made to the objects on the client side. ...

pattern & practices are working on a new guide, called "Improving Web Services Security"k which is now available as a beta on codeplex. I haven't read it yet, but by just browsing throught the index and some of the initial chapters I can say that it looks very interesting. WCF is a more complex environment, than the old stacks that ...

I run into an issue with grids not showing newly added objects in one of my projects a couple of days ago. We use LINQ to SQL classes and the client is built according to the MVP pattern and what we want to do is of course to add child objects to the collections in the presenter class. The problem with this though is that the newly added object ...

Just the other day (February 27), pattern & practices released the Web Service Software Factory Modeling Edition for Visual Studio 2008. This is great news! To get it up and running I installed the following tools: Visual Studio 2008 SDK Version 1.0 (this is needed because it contains the DSL Toolkit). Guidance Automation Extensions ...

It will probably be easier to follow my upcoming posts about how I have enabled my requirements of the STS in WCF if you have a good understanding of the security architecture of WCF. This is a good starting point if you don't have that understanding.

Almost three years ago I started to think in the terms of having an infrastructure service to handle security like verifying users, getting which roles they belong to and so on. Back then it was WSE 3 in a beta and no information available on the Internet (that I could find anyway). I had heard of WS-Trust and I had also seen a sample on an event ...

A Security Token Service (STS) is a web service that issues security tokens. A security token can be used for encrypting and signing messages, and it can be used to carry information about a user (claims). One common security token in a windows environment is a Kerberos Security Token that carries information about the current windows user. ...

First of all, the service factory version 3 will be released any minute now. I've just listen to Don Smith from pattern & practices and he hopes that he got the sign of on the bits by now so that he can release version 3 after this session. Version 3 main goal is to enable model driven creation of services, but it also wanted to enable the ...

Yesterday Christian Weyer (thinktecture) wrote about two interesting SOA-related announcements from Microsoft. Both was totally new for me. The first is Microsoft Managed Services Engine (MSE) that ''enables service virtualization through a Service Repository'' and by doing so provides ''the ability to support versioning, abstraction, management, ...

When creating services in SOA it's very common need, for one service to publish events of different kinds so that other services can react on them. This is called Event Driven Architecture (EDA) and one good blog that I use to follow in the space of SOA and EDA is called exactly that. Except for events there is also a common need for services to ...

If you are interested in ASP.NET and design patterns, especially MVC, I think that you should take a look at ScottGu presentation of the new MVC support in ASP.NET. The framework seems to be extremely pluggable which also means that it will be very testable. This will probably be released sometimes after Visual Studio 2008. It is Scott Hanselman ...

During TechEd Microsoft announced Acropolis, which is a new framework for building more modularized client applications. Acropolis should feel familiar for CAB and Smart Client Software Factory users and there should be a migration strategy. I have downloaded and installed the CTP1, but I haven't even tried the simplest thing with it, so instead ...