Learn to write C# the fun way! In this introductory webcast we provide an overview of the topics covered throughout this webcast series. Beginning with an introduction to game programming concepts such as game loops and main game components, we then examine the basic elements of working within the Microsoft Visual C# programming environment. You will also have a chance to catch a glimpse of "Star Trooper" the game project we will build over the course of this series.

May 03, 2005 75 minutes

You have already seen an overview of what will be covered, in this series, during the first webcast. Now we will provide you with a foundation of general programming concepts, as well as focusing on specific programming elements in Microsoft Visual C# Express Edition in the second webcast of this series. Topics being covered include variables, expressions, statements, operators, functions, flow control, classes, arrays, structures and C# types.

May 05, 2005 69 minutes

Building upon the basic programming concepts presented in the previous session, the third webcast in this series focuses on specific game issues including graphics, player input, sound and networking. The discussion covers elements such as 2D/3D graphics, vector versus bitmap graphics, the use of keyboards/mouse/force feedback, audio formats, 3D audio, networking protocols, multiplayer, and peer-to-peer versus client/server networking models.

May 10, 2005 78 minutes

After briefly touching on graphics in the previous webcast, the fourth webcast in this series will focus on a specific graphical element called "sprites." Many games utilize sprites for everything from characters to game meters. This portion of the series looks at how the creation and implementation of animated sprites are incorporated into the game project, including background art production, view ports, definition of frames, frame delay, transparency, and alpha-blending. We then apply these concepts to implement the "main" and "enemy" characters of the game project.

May 12, 2005 74 minutes

Building on the concepts of working with animated sprites introduced in the previous session, this webcast focuses on how to make the sprites move. This webcast looks at topics such as translation, scale, rotation, velocity, and collision, and shows how to use these techniques how to move the "enemy" character in the game project.

May 17, 2005 73 minutes

You learned how to make the sprites move in the previous webcast, this session focuses on how a video game handles player input to create and move a sprite. Learn how to incorporate keyboard input, vector direction, and position into the game project's implementation of main character and enemy movement as well as "shooting bullets."

May 19, 2005 67 minutes

Audio is unquestionably an important aspect to any video game. This session builds upon the previous webcasts and examines the development issues surrounding the implementation of background music and sound effects that are essential to great video games. In addition to these incidental audio elements, you will learn how to implement the score feature into the game project.

May 24, 2005 57 minutes

Continuing the discussion of sprites from the previous sessions, this final webcast in the series goes into more detail regarding sprite behavior and collision detection. Learn how to apply these concepts to the game project's control of enemy behavior as well as bullet behavior.

May 26, 2005 67 minutes

This video introduces developing ASP.NET applications in a shared hosting environment by demonstrating "Live Editing" and "Remote Publication" features in Visual Web Developer 2008.

09 March 2009 46 minutes

This video introduces the exciting new remote management functionality built for the IIS7 manager and illustrates both Server and Client configuration as well as the two different authorization options.

09 March 2009 22 minutes

This video demonstrates how to work with remotely administering SPECFIC web site features with IIS7 remote / delegated administration.

09 March 2009 9 minutes

This video provides you with a quick inventory of tools to troubleshoot your production ASP.NET applications.

09 March 2009 30 minutes

This video demonstrates the provisioning process for new web sites with IIS7.

09 March 2009 8 minutes

FTP7 is new and powerful. This video shows you how to get it up and running!

09 March 2009 8 minutes

This video will teach how to install and configure a great new IIS7 feature – Bit Rate Throttling. With BRT you can serve media files or big downloads without ruining your sites UI performance.

09 March 2009 7 minutes

If you're hosting media files on your web site, play lists will let you define sequences for your media and optionally prevent users from skipping parts of the content (like ads or disclaimers).

10 March 2009 9 minutes

In Part 1 of this webcast series, you have the opportunity to put together the basic user interface design for the game and learn the fundamentals of Windows Presentation Foundation.

May 2, 2006 60 minutes

In Part 2 of this webcast series, you get to practice creating the Sudoku game classes and binding the user interface to the game logic through a custom control.

May 4, 2006 60 minutes

In Part 3 of this webcast series, you learn how to make your Sudoku game look cool by adding features such as animation, skinning, and user interface effects.

May 8, 2006 60 minutes

In Part 4 of this webcast series, you get experience with creating more complex custom controls for your Sudoku game. We also show you how to build a security-conscious plug-in system to implement various Sudoku-solving algorithms.

May 10, 2006 60 minutes

In Part 5 of this webcast series, you learn how to build an interface for your Sudoku game to load and benchmark multiple AIs, as well as a custom graphing component that compares the AIs.

May 12, 2006 60 minutes

A. What is DarkGDK?
B. How can DarkGDK make game programming easier?
C. Installing Visual C++ Express and DarkGDK
D. Game and resource files

November 6, 2008 60 minutes

In this webcast, we examine the fundamental structure and flow of the game we are pulling apart in this six-part series. We explore items like the overall flow of the game, the separate sections of the game structure, and the logic that holds it all together. This is essentially a description of the game chassis.

November 17, 2008 60 minutes

In this webcast, we cover the actual game levels and explain how the level loop differs from the game loop. We also describe controlling the player object, player weapon, bullets, and collisions with the game bounds. At the end of this webcast, we have things happening on the screen with interactions.

November 20, 2008 60 minutes

In this webcast, we cover the enemies in the game, explain the way they are set up and handled, and describe how they are controlled by the simplest of game artificial intelligence (AI). We explore how inter-enemy collisions and responses work and show how the player bullets interact with the enemies. At the end of this webcast, we will have the makings of our game as the player faces the enemy for the first time.

December 4, 2008 60 minutes

In this webcast, we cover the explosion effects in the game and examine how sounds are triggered by the various game elements. We also explore how to display information on-screen for things like scoring and explain how to control them with simple function calls.

December 11, 2008 60 minutes

Join us for this final installment of our six-part webcast series to learn how to set the difficulty curve of the game and make levels. We also discuss testing the game, making final adjustments to the game, and getting it ready for release. We explore how to take the game further with simple expansion possibilities. We finish with the idea that you are now better equipped to tackle a similar game yourself in C++ and DarkGDK.

December 12, 2008 60 minutes

This initial webcast provides an introduction to the 3-D pipeline, including 3-D technical terms and the different stages and algorithms to use. Learn how to use projection and ray tracing methods, too.

January 16, 2006 60 minutes

This session on the 3-D engine is split across two webcasts that cover 3-D game element issues such as game loop, input, collision, behavior, rendering, and sound. Participants set up the Microsoft Visual C# project and learn how to use the 3-D C# template while the instructor describes the 3-D engine structure.

January 17, 2006 60 minutes

This session on the 3-D engine is split across two webcasts that cover 3-D game element issues such as game loop, input, collision, behavior, rendering, and sound. Participants set up the Microsoft Visual C# project and learn how to use the 3-D C# template while the instructor describes the 3-D engine structure.

January 18, 2006 60 minutes

This session is split across two webcasts that cover background display, camera control, object animation, and object control. At the end of these two webcasts, the user should be able to display a background and a character, add and control the camera, and also add and control characters or objects.

January 23, 2006 60 minutes

This session is split across two webcasts that cover background display, camera control, object animation, and object control. At the end of these two webcasts, the user should be able to display a background and a character, add and control the camera, and also add and control characters or objects.

January 24, 2006 60 minutes

This particular webcast explains how to handle object/background and object/object collision in your game.

January 25, 2006 60 minutes

This webcast focuses on handling artificial intelligence (AI) in your games. Simple artificial intelligence (AI) based on Dx/Dy and time, and also shortest path AI based on a graph is presented to control characters in the provided game example.

January 30, 2006 60 minutes

In this webcast, participants create additional skill levels for their games and learn about how to make the main character jump using a table-based approach and a physics-based approach.

January 31, 2006 60 minutes

In this webcast, participants are introduced to game play tuning elements for the project, including character game variables such as lives and speed, and also enemy variables such as respawning and speed. This webcast focuses on handling game play in your game.

February 1, 2006 60 minutes

This webcast focuses on developing your game’s user interface (UI). Find out how to implement a menu system for your game that contains the standard options such as Play, Instructions, and Exit.

February 6, 2006 60 minutes

This final webcast in the series provides an introduction to effects used in games including blending, shadows, lighting, and sound. We also focus on handling the miscellaneous effects in your game.

February 7, 2006 60 minutes

Web parts make it possible to create components of a Web UI that can be reused on multiple Web pages. These are introduced in ASP.NET and built in SharePoint Products and Technologies, where they can be added to pages by users and managed by IT professionals. Join this webcast to learn how to build simple Web parts and how to connect them back to site data.

Presenter: Robert L. Bogue, Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server, Thor Projects, LLC

May 20, 2008 60 minutes

Data lists provide data storage for users in SharePoint Products and Technologies. Users can create lists with schema all through the UI and they can create, edit, and view the data. All of this data can be programmatically accessed by developers and this webcast is all about that.

Presenter: Robert L. Bogue, Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server, Thor Projects, LLC

May 21, 2008 60 minutes

Microsoft Silverlight is a new Web UI technology that enables the implementation of animations and video. In this webcast, we show how a SharePoint Products and Technologies UI can be enhanced by using Silverlight in Web parts as part of a site.

Presenter: Andrew Connell, Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server, Independent Consultant

May 27, 2008 60 minutes

Event handlers (or event receivers) are custom code that run on SharePoint Products and Technologies in response to something that happens on the server. Event handlers can be useful for running business logic in response to data being added to the site. In this webcast, we show how to create simple event handlers and investigate ways that you can use them.

Presenter: Andrew Connell, Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server, Independent Consultant.

May 28, 2008 60 minutes

Web applications need design, and SharePoint Products and Technologies makes this possible with master pages, cascading style sheets, and themes. In this webcast, we explore how to apply these artifacts and describe the process for modifying those artifacts to achieve a Web site design using SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Presenter: Andrew Connell, Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server, Independent Consultant

June 03, 2008 60 minutes

Workflows make it possible to implement processes that require interaction, such as e-mail approval or form completion, by people in your organization. In this webcast, we show you how to use the Microsoft Visual Studio development system to create simple workflows in SharePoint Products and Technologies that involve approvals from people by e-mail and for meeting room resource bookings with an administrator.

Presenter: Robert L. Bogue, Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server, Thor Projects, LLC

June 4, 2008 60 minutes

SharePoint Products and Technologies make it possible to allow list data access using code running on the server machine and also using Web services. In this webcast, we cover some of the simple Web services provided by SharePoint Products and Technologies and show how to create a new Web service on a computer.

Presenter: Andrew Connell, Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server, Independent Consultant

June 10, 2008 60 minutes

In this session, we look at how pages in SharePoint Products and Technologies are arranged into Web sites. We explain menus, such as the site actions menu, the top navigation bar menu, and the edit control block menu. We also discuss how to update the menus so that you can customize a Web site built on SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Presenter: Andrew Connell, Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server, Independent Consultant

June 11, 2008 60 minutes

SharePoint Products and Technologies make it possible for users to create Web sites; when a user creates a site, he or she can also manage the user permissions on that site. In this webcast, we show how some aspects of user management are handled, including how you can audit activities that users do and show different data depending on the user's role.

Presenter: Robert L. Bogue, Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server, Thor Projects LLC

June 17, 2008 60 minutes

Content types define what documents or other content types are used in SharePoint Products and Technologies document libraries. Content types can have several aspects associated with them, including custom menus and custom processing. In this webcast, we show how to create a custom content type and explain how to associate an event handler with the new content type to do data validation.

Presenter: Robert L. Bogue, Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server, Thor Projects LLC

June 18, 2008 60 minutes

LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query and it allows you to query over things like objects, databases and XML in a standard way with a new syntax available in the latest versions of Visual Basic and C#. In this Webcast you will learn how to get started writing LINQ queries using the simple but powerful query syntax available in Visual Basic. We'll walk through a variety of basic queries as well look at aggregates and groups over different data sources. You will also see how writing queries over XML using specific Visual Basic syntax like XML literals and axis properties can help you be much more productive when working with XML.

Presenters: Beth Massi is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team.

March 14, 2008 60 minutes

The Microsoft .NET Language Integrated Query, code-named the “LINQ” project, is a set of extensions to the Microsoft .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. LINQ extends Microsoft Visual C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities. In this session, we cover some of the basics of LINQ and explore the key LINQ-related components, such as:
• BLINQ – A tool for generating Microsoft ASP.NET Web sites for displaying, creating, and manipulating data based on database schema
• LINQ to SQL (formerly DLINQ) – A specialized API for accessing Structured Query Language (SQL) relational databases
• LINQ to XML (formerly XLINQ) – A lightweight, rational, and simple API for manipulating XML

Presenter: Anand "AI" Iyer, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

November 02, 2006 63 minutes

This web cast will dive into details how the LinQ features work. In the process, we will discuss anonymous types, type inference, inline functions, extension methods, and how these features work together to give you the LinQ experience. In addition, we will demo how these features can be used independently to help you build your applications quicker and with less code.

Presenters: Amanda Silver is a Program Manager on the VB team.

May 09, 2007 58 minutes

This web cast extends the SQL and LinQ web cast by showing you how to use the new OR designer to build applications that take advantage of LinQ to SQL.

Presenters: Young Joo is a Program Manager on the VB team.

May 02, 2007 64 minutes

This web cast will explore best practices for writing easy to read, consumable queries, including naming, usage, and performance ideas.

Presenters: Lisa Feigenbaum is a Program Manager on the VB team.

June 13, 2007 55 minutes

Language Integrated Query (LINQ) provides the ability to write query expressions directly within Microsoft Visual C# or Visual Basic. LINQ makes it significantly easier to query and access all types of data. During this session, we introduce you to LINQ and teach you about several different flavors of LINQ, including LINQ to Objects and LINQ to XML.

Presenter: Rob Bagby, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

February 28, 2008 60 minutes

Microsoft .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) provides a common way to work with data in your applications. In this session, we dive into how LINQ provides methods to work with Structured Query Language (SQL) databases, including how to query, insert, and manage data using the LINQ framework.

Presenter: Mike Benkovich, MSDN Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

September 10, 2007 64 minutes

Think you have heard all there is to know about Microsoft .NET Language-Integrated Query (LINQ)? Think again! In this webcast, we dazzle and amaze you with our staggering array of wondrous tools to make your LINQ experience a memorable one!

Presenter: Zain Naboulsi, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

April 17, 2008 90 minutes

In other sessions, we explored how Microsoft .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is used for Structured Query Language (SQL) databases and working with XML. In this webcast, we connect to the data access layer, the business objects that provide the functionality of working with enterprise data. Join us to learn how you can make your LINQ applications really sing when working with entities.

Presenter: Mike Benkovich, MSDN Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

September 24, 2007 62 minutes

In other sessions, we have already seen how Microsoft .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) works with relational databases. In this webcast, we explore how LINQ can help you develop XML applications. We cover the basics of the XML helper functions, and we also dive into deeper topics.

Presenter: Mike Benkovich, MSDN Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

September 17, 2007 64 minutes

A.Overview of Silverlight 2
B. Silverligt 2 architecture
C. the new features specific to Silverlight 2
D. Silverlight tools: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Expression Blend
E. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) UI framework for Silverlight, which is a subset of the WPF UI framework for the desktop and Windows Presentation Foundation
F. Silverlight controls
G. How to render content correctly when you resize the page
H. Silverlight controls: including Button, Calendar, ListBox, Image, Grid, Slider, and TextBox.

June 16, 2008 60 minutes

A. Microsoft Silverlight 2 Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) UI framework
B. Data-binding support
C. Customizing the appearance of your controls with the templating and skinning model in Silverlight 2.
D. Bind UI elements to business objects for rich data scenarios with model, view, and container separation.
E. Control templating allows you to change color and style and the whole visual tree of your control and even add custom animations without writing code.

June 18, 2008 60 minutes

A. Deep Zoom allows users to easily and cleanly navigate through very large images and only download the portions of the images needed.
B. The considerations that you must make when working with large images
C. How Silverlight 2, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, and Microsoft Expression Blend enable you to implement Deep Zoom in applications easily.

June 20, 2008 60 minutes

A. Microsoft Silverlight 2 has a robust networking stack, and it supports Representational State Transfer (REST), SOAP, WS*, HTTP endpoints, and even cross-domain networking
B. Implementing calls to Web services from your Silverlight 2 Microsoft .NET-connected applications using a variety of methods, including standard ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Services, and REST.

June 23, 2008 60 minutes

A. New testing framework enables you to write unit tests for UI and non-UI functionality in Silverlight 2, and it includes more than 2,000 unit tests covering all of the released Silverlight 2 controls.
B. Built-in unit tests and how to build your own unit tests or extend the included unit tests
C. The support in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 for debugging your Silverlight 2 applications.

June 25, 2008 60 minutes

A. Adaptive streaming is an addition to the rich media capabilities of Silverlight 2.
B. Adaptive streaming enables Silverlight 2 applications to examine the capabilities of the client computer, like CPU and bandwidth, and adjusts the bit-rate encoding of streaming video to handle network congestion and CPU usage automatically.
C. Other cool features of Silverlight 2
D. Silverlight Mobile.

July 25, 2007 9? minutes

In this first webcast in our 15-part series, we introduce you to WCF as a technology for service-orientated architecture (SOA), discuss the programming model, and provide a short overview of core features that will be discussed in subsequent webcasts.

July 02, 2007 72 minutes

Clients communicate with services by exchanging messages that are serialized on the wire, and de-serialized into common language runtime (CLR) types at each end. In the simplest scenario, client and service developers only work with objects, and all the serialization magic happens somewhere down below in the plumbing. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides this plumbing. The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) describes the protocols required to reach the service, the clients use proxies to communicate with the service, and messages just happen. There are times, however, when developers must exercise more control over service contract design, message serialization, and the choice of protocols. For these scenarios, it helps to understand the options available. In this webcast, we provide practical guidance for designing service contracts, data contracts, and message contracts—showing you when and how to employ each. Join this session to learn simple code-first approaches to complex type serialization, to find out how to employ contract-first approaches with IXmlSerializable types, and to see where message contracts are best employed. We also describe how to support polymorphic behavior with known types.

July 09, 2007 73 minutes

Clients rely on contracts defined by the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) to communicate with services. The WSDL contract describes the operations available at each service endpoint and the format and schema for messages related to each operation, including the schema for complex types exchanged between parties. Making changes to contracts once they have been published is a delicate matter, as that can create compatibility issues with existing clients. The only option is to ensure backward compatibility or expose a new version of the contract for new clients. In this webcast, we focus on approaches to version tolerance and contract versioning. We provide guidelines for strict and non-strict approaches to contract versioning, describe how to design service contracts and data contracts to be version tolerant, and illustrate how to handle explicit versioning of service contracts and data contracts with the least impact to business components that support your services.

July 11, 2007 71 minutes

In a distributed system, exceptions that occur remotely must traverse process or computer boundaries before they reach the client. In a service-oriented architecture (SOA), the boundary is a service boundary that may be located in the same process, or across process or computer boundaries. Beyond these distribution boundaries, there may also be technology and platform boundaries: such situations require interoperable communication. In this webcast, we provide an introduction to SOAP faults and their relationship to service metadata, since they are the standard for propagating exceptions from services. We also discuss different exception handling scenarios in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), including how services and clients handle common language runtime (CLR) exceptions, how to declare and throw SOAP faults, and how to provide common exception-handling behaviors for a service using IErrorHandler. We also explain the implications on contract design and implementation, and on client exception handling.

July 13, 2007 69 minutes

So far in this series, we have learned how to expose a service endpoint using a few of the standard bindings, such as NetTcpBinding and BasicHttpBinding. In fact, every service endpoint is associated with a particular binding. Bindings describe the transport protocol, message encoding format, and other messaging protocols that define the communication channel. In this webcast, we explain how binding configuration builds the communication channel, introduce you to each of the standard bindings, and explain the core protocols and features provided by each of these bindings. We also cover common scenarios where standard bindings can be applied, describe configuration settings that are most applicable to the scenario, and explore how to apply a custom binding when the standard bindings do not satisfy your requirements.

July 23, 2007 72 minutes

For a service to be accessible at run time, it must be hosted in a managed process. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services can be hosted with Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0, with the new Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) installed with IIS version 7.0, or with any other managed application process, including console, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), or Windows service applications. Selecting the right hosting environment for services is a choice driven by the application deployment scenario, including the requirements for transport protocol and operating platform. There are also other features available to each hosting environment that can further influence deployment decisions and the choice of host. In this webcast, we describe the desired features of a hosting environment and the fundamentals of WCF service hosting. We also drill deeper into hosting semantics and features of Windows applications, Windows services, IIS, and WAS. In the process, we learn practical implementations for each hosting environment, gain insight into their specific features and benefits, and discuss how to select the right host for your service.

July 25, 2007 9? minutes

When you build a distributed enterprise system, many types of message exchange are available to meet the needs of different communication patterns. In this webcast, we discuss a variety of messaging patterns and describe how they satisfy different deployment and communication requirements for your services. Join this session as we:

* Explore approaches for handling large messages, such as Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) and streaming.
* Learn how classic message exchange patterns are employed and discuss the impact on service contract design and communications as you move from request/reply to introduce one-way operations or callback contracts (duplex).
* Review options for publish and subscribe implementations.
* See an example of how you can build a classic router and deal with related messaging and configuration semantics.

Our intent in this presentation is to provide you with a high-level understanding of the rich scenarios Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) supports for messaging and to illustrate what those configurations look like.

August 10, 2007 74 minutes

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services can be configured so that the lifetime of the service instance is limited to the duration of the request, for the duration of a client session (proxy instance), or forever, as in the case of singleton services. The choice of optimal service lifetime may vary by application, given the expected calling pattern of clients, requirements for state-awareness, and the expected throughput necessary to serve requests. Instancing modes in WCF control the way that service objects are allocated to handle requests. Requests to each service endpoint are processed by the appropriate service object, based on the instancing mode for the service type. In this webcast, we explore PerCall, PerSession, and Single instancing modes, explain call and lifetime semantics for each, and illustrate the scenarios in which they are best applied.

August 13, 2007 68 minutes

Deploying services as part of a large-scale enterprise system usually calls for features with conflicting goals. On one hand, you want to allow as many concurrent requests to process as possible, for throughput. On the other hand, you want to throttle requests, so that server resources are not exhausted. In this webcast, we explore the features Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides for managing concurrent access and throttling access to services. Learn how to configure services to allow reentrancy or concurrent threads to access a particular service instance, see how these settings relate to instancing modes, and discover how to protect services from concurrent access using WCF or class Microsoft .NET multithreading techniques. We also describe how WCF allocates threads to handle concurrent requests, explain how to throttle those requests, and provide guidance on typical settings based on instancing modes. We conclude this session with a discussion on load balancing and failover semantics in relation to WCF services, paying particular attention to the various types of sessions you can employ.

August 15, 2007 82 minutes

The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is secure by default, providing numerous baked-in binding scenarios that initialize various combinations of transport and message-level security settings. You almost always need to override the default binding configuration to provide the appropriate security constraints for your service boundaries. In this webcast, we start with the security basics: authentication, authorization, the difference between single hop and message-level security, and how to apply digital signatures and encryption. Next, we explore several common deployment scenarios for services within an enterprise system and the associated security configurations that would apply to those scenarios. Join this session as we learn how to configure security for key scenarios without getting lost in the mire of binding configurations.

August 24, 2007 76 minutes

The security model in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) supports a rich, claims-based approach to authorization. Virtually any security token can be represented as a set of claims, including tokens that contain Windows credentials, username and password, or X509 certificates. Normalized claims are at the heart of any federated security model, allowing developers to decouple how tokens are mapped to a set of domain-specific claims and how users are authorized based on those claims. In this webcast, we show you how to build a claims-based security model using custom authorization policies, permissions, and attributes. Learn how this plays into a federated model, allowing you to decouple authentication and authorization from your business service implementations using WSFederationHttpBinding. We also discuss SAML tokens, describe how to create custom claims, and examine how the flow of communication works between clients, token issuers, and services.

August 27, 2007 79 minutes

When you send messages to a remote service, you would like to be sure they get there. If the message does not arrive, you probably want to try again. At a minimum, you want to know if the message never arrived so you can take corrective action. These delivery assurances are provided by some transport protocols, such as TCP and named pipes, but even those assurances can only be guaranteed from point-to-point. If an intermediary, like a proxy server or message router, exists between the sending and receiving applications, there are no guarantees beyond the assurance that the message reached the first network node in transit. In this webcast, we introduce you to reliable sessions, a binding feature in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) that provides assurance at the message level using WS-ReliableMessaging (WS-RM). Join us to learn how to enable reliable sessions on standard bindings, to see how WS-RM works, and to discover how to control reliability settings using a custom binding.

August 29, 2007 72 minutes

Transactions are critical for system reliability. Transactions are necessary when two or more activities must be coordinated as a single operation—ensuring that the system is always left in a consistent state. The only two viable options are to complete the two activities successfully, or to leave the system as it was before initiating either activity. Transactional programming is a well-known technique for guaranteeing a consistent system state. While Microsoft .NET version 2.0 provides a mechanism for initiating transactions, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) makes it possible for services to participate in distributed transactions across process and computer boundaries, and to initiate transactions at the service tier. In fact, this is done via an interoperable Web service protocol called WS-AtomicTranscation (WS-AT). In this webcast, we show you how to configure the Distributed Transaction Control (DTC) to support WS-AT, and we explain how to configure your WCF clients and services to support transactions over any protocol.

September 04, 2007 70 minutes

Queued calls are yet another way to achieve reliability in a distributed system. When you send messages using a classic request/reply pattern, the response traditionally indicates whether the request was successful. In the case of one-way messages, it is difficult to be sure that the message arrived at its destination and was process successfully because no response is provided. By definition, with one-way calls, you probably care less about the success of the call (given that there is not a reply), but you do care that the message arrived. Unlike reliable the sessions discussed earlier in our series, queued calls make it possible not only to improve system performance by offloading work to another thread or computer, but also to guarantee arrival of a message and that the message will not be lost, since it can be stored in a durable message queue. In this webcast, we show you how to expose Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services over Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), demonstrate practical scenarios where queued services can be helpful, and explain various configuration settings for NetMsmqBinding and their implications on system reliability and security.

September 04, 2007 67 minutes

As rich in features as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is, you can make it even richer by hooking into the many points of extensibility provided by the service model. There are many reasons why you might write custom extensions, for example to:

* Standardize coding practices.
* Provide sound defaults for host and channel initialization.
* Add new behaviors for message processing.
* Control how messages are processed.
* Provide standard error-handling semantics.
* Extend the security model to support custom credentials or custom authorization techniques.
* Flow context across service boundaries.
* Control how metadata is generated.
* Create custom communication and messaging protocols.

In this webcast, we provide you with a long list of extensibility points and their purposes, while demonstrating some popular requirements and their solutions.

September 07, 2007 70 minutes