Some people try to call them rubbish, involved in negative publicity and made fun of them. But, the fact has come out. Microsoft has posted a good profit in its Q3 results. Q3 results were 103% high over the previous quarter results.

Look at the complete report at Microsoft site or anyother place you wish.

I refered to this news

 Get an early look at Visual Studio code name "Orcas"
The next version of Visual Studio, Microsoft® Visual Studio® code name “Orcas”, will provide an industry-leading developer experience for Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and the Web. In addition, it will continue in the Microsoft tradition of development language innovation. To enable early feedback, this page provides links to Community Technology Preview (CTP) and Beta releases of Visual Studio code name “Orcas”, and for technologies that we plan to include in it. As previews of additional technologies become available, we will make them available from this page.

I know its late... but for those who don't know this yet... Here is the link to play with. Download the iso image or the VPC with pre-installed bits.

Welcome to the next generation!!!

Ladies and gentlemen... now presenting the most secure OS award. The nominees are

Linux... from Red Hat
Mac... from Apple
HP-UX... from HP
Solaris... from Sun... and...
Windows... from Microsoft

And now... May I call upon Symantec to announce the winner.

Symantec: After a study on huge range of security and vulnerabilities over the last 6 months, we have decided the winner.

And the award for the most secure OS goes to... hold your breath... Microsoft Windows.

Don't believe.. read it for yourself here

Seems like Microsoft is making the right moves in getting kids use computers, government school kids that is.

Microsoft has a tie up with 10 state governments in India to provide Windows XP Starter Edition, Office and Live Mail for little more than 120 rupees per user. This gives the students of those schools some privilege to use computers and cope up with the kids in those corporate schools.

Must say, its a nice and wise move. Kids in Kerala however cannot enjoy this due to the government's decision to NOT have Microsoft software in Government schools. No comments on whether it is a wise decision from the government or not. Leaving this on the time to decide.

You can look here for complete details

So... here we go. One more interesting stuff from Microsoft.

Microsoft Silverlight makes your life easy as a web application developer. This will allow cross browser, cross platform plug-in for rich interactive applications on the web.

Please keep a close eye on the MIX (April 30th) for more information on this.

Apparantly, this software was named after David Silverlight. David Silverlight is the owner of several technical and work related sites including XMLPitstop and Community-Credit. You can look at the blog he posted on this here.

If you are curious about this guy, look at my earlier post for snap and details

For Windows mobile developers... here are some FAQs

Silverlight and Windows Mobile

What’s your Silverlight story for mobile devices?

At NAB and Mix we will be announcing a cross platform, cross browser platform for delivering rich interactive experiences and media on the web called Silverlight.  While our initial release is focused on the desktop experience, we plan to extend the Silverlight experience to mobile devices.

How do you respond to Adobe’s statement that Flash will be on over 1 billion phones by 2010?  Aren’t you late to the game?

Adobe's announcement that there will be 1 billion Flash *capable* mobile handsets in 2010 highlights that phones are becoming more capable of delivering rich interactive media and experiences.  Today more than 100 million devices already support Windows Media technology including handsets from providers like Verizon. Silverlight will provide the complete media experience for the content owner including industry leading codecs and integrated conversion tools so that customers do not have to go to third parties like On2 to convert assets for mobile devices.

When do you expect to have Silverlight support for mobile devices?

We’re announcing Silverlight as a cross platform, cross browser platform for delivering media and interactive experiences to the desktop.  Our roadmap includes mobile devices but we have nothing to announce at this time.

A year ago you said at MIX06 that mobile support was a year out.  Why the further delay?

Microsoft has decided to expand the capabilities of the entire platform based on customer feedback starting with the desktop, and eventually expanding to devices as well.  We'll be sharing more details about how we're expanding the desktop experience at MIX07.

Will you bring Silverlight to Windows Mobile?

With over 140+ Windows Mobile devices shipping from 125 mobile operators in 55 countries, Windows Mobile is the fastest growing mobile OS in the world (according to IDC). Although we have nothing to announce about Windows Mobile support today, we will continue to deliver on vision to enable designers and developers to use their skills, including Silverlight, across different form factors, from servers to desktops to Windows Mobile powered devices.

Will you bring Silverlight to non-Windows Mobile devices?

Our intention is for Silverlight to be a cross platform experience but we have nothing else to announce at this time.

*Above FAQ is directly taken from Microsoft site/mail*

This can be tricky at times.

If all you want is the basic communication WSDL, you can get it by appending ?WSDL to the .svc file. This will output the required WSDL. A sample for this would be something like:

http://localhost/MyService/Service.svc?WSDL

But sometimes you want to see everything that is produced. Especially, if you are used to ASMX way of development, you'd want to see the complete WSDL instead of the communicaiton portion. Here is where WCF strikes.

There is not just one, but several url's you need to browse before getting the required stuff.

First check in the content if you have any additional WSDL, or you can simply do a brute-force method.

http://localhost/MyService/Service.svc?WSDL=WSDL0 will give you additional information. There might be times (depending on your service) you should be looking for WSDL1. No point playing around as this is what the most you can go through.

Now, all you have is the complete WSDL, though in different files. If you look into the content, you still miss the type information (if you are using any custom data contracts). This is where your probing power will help you.

Look into the WSDL0 file to check for the XSD links. If you are lazy, again retort to the brute-force.

http://localhost/MyServoce/Service.svc?XSD=XSD0 will give you first level information of types. Depending on your case, you might want to look for XSD1 and XSD2 to get the complete information. Again, no point in playing around as this the max you can get.

When are done with this, you'll get all the information requried.

Now... you must be wondering why Microsoft did it this way. This gives a much greater control on the content rather than clogging everything on your screen.

I agree, there should be a way to get everything at a single go for those interested. But, some design decisions should be made as to where we are going to stop. This is one such thing I believe.

-IamJunk

OOP suggests that all the similar elements should be grouped as single entity.

If you are using WCF, this is kind of tricky. If you have multiple service contracts in different entities (classes), you should implement all the service contracts in a behavior class. Here comes a problem.

If you have multiple service behavior classes, then you will end up developing multiple .svc file to be hosted in IIS. There are several ways to solve this problem. I'll discuss three of them here.

• Single Service Behavior:

This is kind of straight forward, have a single Service Bahavior class that implements all the ServiceContracts. This is fine as you can have a single ServiceContract implemented in a single file, but yet as a part of the single ServiceBehavior class (using the partial classes). The only problem comes when you want to expose these services. A single service can have multiple contracts defined and yet communicate using a single address.

The config will look something like this:

<services>
   <service
    name="MyFirstService.SampleService" >
    <endpoint
      address=""
      contract="MyFirstService.ServiceContract1"
      binding="wsHttpBinding"/>
    <endpoint
      address=""
      contract="MyFirstService.ServiceContract2"
      binding="wsHttpBinding"/>
    <endpoint
      contract="IMetadataExchange"
      binding="mexHttpBinding"
      address="mex"/>
   </service>
</services>

This will create a single service and exposes multiple service contracts as if everything is part of the same service.

However, the proxy generated will have different Client classes for each Service Contract.

In this case, the proxy will have classes like ServiceContract1Client and ServiceContract2Client.

• Facade Model:

This is much similar to the previous one, except for the implementation of the ServiceContracts will no be directly done by the ServiceBehavior class. Instead, they'll be done in different classes and a single Facade class will be developed that will act as the ServiceBehavior. This class will implement all the ServiceContracts and will just invoke the methods in the implementation class.

The advantages we get out of this are all that Facade pattern provides.

• Proxy Chaining:

This is another approach where you'll have a single ServiceBehavior class and implements only a single ServiceContract. If you have multiple ServiceContracts ServiceContract1 and ServiceContract2, your ServiceBehavior class will implement ServiceContract2 and ServiceContract2 will inherit from ServiceContract1.

[ServiceContract]
public interface ServiceContract1
{
    [OperationContract]
    void Display();
}

[ServiceContract]
public interface ServiceContract2 : ServiceContract1
{
    [OperationContract]
    void Compute();
}

[ServiceBehavior]
public class SampleService : ServiceContract2
{
    public void Display()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
    }
    public void Compute()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(10*20);
    }
}

The config file for this would look like this:

<services>
         <service name = "MyFirstService.SampleService">
            <endpoint
               address  = ""
               binding  = "wsHttpBinding"
               contract = "MyFirstService.ServiceContract2" />
         </service>
</services>

This will create a single proxy with two clients, one for each ServiceContract.

There might be other ways of doing this, but this should be a good start to work with your simple WCF services.

Last month, I met David of CommunityCredit fame when I went to Miami. Below is the photo we took outside the bar at Hollywood.

From left to right

Nageswara Ranga Rao (Ranga): Microsoft SharePoint Consultant

David Silverlight (David): Communit Credit site owner

Brajendra Singh (BJ): Microsoft Communications Consultant

Sidhartha (IamJunk): Microsoft Business Solutions Consultant