Anith Gopal

Although I didn’t include it in the release candidate announcement, the online documentation collection for WCF has also been updated. While you can navigate between the different framework versions for the reference documentation, some people seem to be having more trouble finding the conceptual documentation and samples, which are not as tightly linked together. Here are the starting pages for those document collections as well as a direct link to download all of the sample source code.

Yesterday marked the second beta release of Windows Server AppFabric.

The CLR team has recently released a fix for slow startup of asynchronous IO threads that may affect WCF users. After startup, asynchronous IO threads are created at a slow pace to avoid spikes in the number of threads. Having extra idle threads consume system resources needlessly

Today is a US national holiday, which generally means I don’t put up a post due to the drastically reduced number of readers. Here’s a look ahead at some of the topics coming this week though: Final part of the series on named pipes My notes on HTTP listener error codes A look at the WCF binary encoding protocol And, for those of you not in the US or Canada, here’s a short post to tide you over today

Why are the members of a data contract expected in a particular order in order to be read? The order of members is frequently used to build an expectation of what element might be appearing next. Knowing the possible order of data instead of potentially having to accept data in any order tends to make deserialization both faster and cheaper

As we get closer to the release of .Net 4 it becomes easier to talk about exactly what new features we’re planning to provide. This list is a bit different in places from what you’ve seen in the beta 1 release and there’s always a chance that things might change again. The first part of the list comes from the area of WCF channels

The final version of the Windows 7 SDK is now available. If you’ve been using the beta SDK releases for samples or tools, then this is the version of the SDK that you’ll want to install.

Yesterday I talked about the algorithm the TCP transport uses to reserve a unique port when listening on both IPv4 and IPv6 addreses is enabled for a service.

Why does a message encoder have to be specified before the transport when constructing a binding? A message encoder doesn’t directly fit into a channel stack because the message encoder type doesn’t implement any of the channel shapes

What options can I use with WSHttpBinding to make it friendlier to load balancing? The primary difficulty encountered when using WSHttp with a load balancer is that WSHttp is easy to configure to produce application-level sessions between the client and service

The WCFProxyGenerator tool on CodePlex has been updated, which is a community contributed tool that generates proxy classes that help manage the lifetimes of the proxy objects. As you might guess from the name the primary way that the proxy class helps manage object lifetimes is to deal with factories and proxies that have encountered a communication exception. You can also get two videos that go along with the tool and help explain proxy management: Managing Proxy Lifetime Exception Handling WCF Proxy It looks like this is still a work in progress so the code has changed somewhat since the videos were made.

In the recommendation for designing versionable contract names , there was no mention of the deployment environment of the service. Should this be included by, for example, having different namespaces for development and production deployments of the service?