What I hope happens at Build

A number of people (including Shawn Wildermuth) have been writing and speculating about the Build conference. I'm about to pack to drive down to Anaheim and wanted to document in the blogosphere my hopes about what will be announced there.

I actually hope that .NET on the client is dead. Well not dead - but IMO .NET has had a good run and it's time to let go. When I say .NET on the client I mean WinForms, Silverlight, WPF, all of it.

You might ask why someone who has spent 10+ years working on the platform would say that - and my answer is HTML5.

People often think of me as the BizTalk/WF/WCF guy, or the REST guy. But before I was into either of those things I was actually a pure web developer. HTML, JavaScript, ASP, and then ASP.NET.

In essence I feel like I am going back to my roots these days (come see me talk about HTML5 and mobile app development at VSLive this fall, for example).

That's why as of today this site is now renamed www.masteringhtml5.com - I'm going back to my roots.

My hope is that Microsoft sticks with its first announcement about Windows 8 and that new "immersive" apps or whatever they are going to be called *have* to be built using HTML5 and JavaScript. Not only do I hope that because I'm happy to be going back to my "roots", but I think it is the smartest thing to keep the Windows platform relevant.

I'll have more to come on this topic as the week progresses.

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Getting the "windows azure web role entry point has stopped working" when using Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio

I've been doing more and more Azure work, and because of my partner Brian Randell I've adopted the TFS lifestyle.

After I updated to the most recent version of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio I started to get this error:

"windows azure web role entry point has stopped working"

If I debugged the project I got

System.ServiceModel.CommunicationObjectFaultedException was unhandled
  Message=The communication object, System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel, cannot be used for communication because it is in the Faulted state.
  Source=mscorlib
  StackTrace:
    Server stack trace:
       at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Close(TimeSpan timeout)
    Exception rethrown at [0]:
       at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.HandleReturnMessage(IMessage reqMsg, IMessage retMsg)
       at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.PrivateInvoke(MessageData& msgData, Int32 type)
       at System.ServiceModel.ICommunicationObject.Close(TimeSpan timeout)
       at System.ServiceModel.ClientBase`1.System.ServiceModel.ICommunicationObject.Close(TimeSpan timeout)
       at Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Hosts.WaIISHost.Program.Main(String[] args)
  InnerException:

Either way I was forced to shutdown Visual Studio and reopen it to get the project to deploy to the local dev fabric again.

Of course I turned off the "Just My Code" debugging setting and set the debugger to break on all exceptions and low and behold I got the real exception:

The problem is that the web.config is marked as read-only because it is checked into source control.

Moral of this story - if you are developing with Windows Azure and using source control - you always have to keep your web.config checked out.  Not sure if a fix is coming from MS - but I thought this might be helpful to someone out there.

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Slides and demos from SharePoint Saturday LA!

I had a great (if not short) time at SharePoint Saturday LA - wish I could have spent more time. 

If you came to my session on Workflow and SharePoint - here are my

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New Windows Server AppFabric Customer Advisory Team or AppFabric CAT Blog!

Hey readers - if you are interested in Windows Server AppFabric - make sure to check out the new AppFabric Cat team blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/appfabriccat  looks like a great set of content!

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MEF Demo from VSLive

Thanks to all the attendees of my end of day session on MEF yesterday.  Here's the code.

MEFDemo.zip (78.36 KB)

BTW - the problem I had with the bi-directional Import/Export was that I was calling SatisfyImportsOnce - not ComposeParts.  SIO of course only satisfies the imports on  the object in question - so this makes sense :)

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Slides and Demo from VSLive

Thanks to everyone who came to my AppFabric Cache and REST talks today.

Here are the slides:

W14_Flanders_REST.zip (600.34 KB)
W9_Flanders_AppFabricCache.zip (1.89 MB)

And the demos:

CachingDemo.zip (178.41 KB)
RESTDemo1.zip (302.27 KB)

Thanks again

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SharePoint 2010 RTM and BCS Permissions

If you are using SharePoint 2010 RTM and get the following error:

Access denied by Business Data Connectivity.

It likely is because by default on installation the BCS service doesn't have any permissions enabled at all.

If you go to your central administration site and manage the BCS service and look at Metadata Store permissions you'll see that it is empty

Obviously in a production environment you want to be very deliberate about setting the permissions, but when you are developing you just want your code to work :)

Here's a PowerShell script that will set the permissions on the Metadata store (and all BCS models deployed after you run the script) to all windows users.  Again, not something I recommend for a production machine - but something that is fine for your development machine.

   1: $adminURL="HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\WSS\"

   2: $key = Get-Item $adminURL 

   3: $adminurl = $key.GetValue("CentralAdministrationURL")

   4: Write-Host "Central admin site "+ $adminurl

   5: Add-pssnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

   6:  

   7: Write-Host Updating BCS persmissions 

   8: $obj = Get-SPBusinessDataCatalogMetadataObject -BdcObjectType Catalog -ServiceContext $adminurl

   9: $right = (1+2+0x10+4)

  10: $claim = New-SPClaimsPrincipal -Identity 'c:0!.s|windows' -IdentityType EncodedClaim

  11: Grant-SPBusinessDataCatalogMetadataObject -Identity $obj -Principal $claim  -Right $right

  12: Copy-SPBusinessDataCatalogAclToChildren -MetadataObject $obj

  13: Write-Host Complete

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AppFabric in June

Hey - I know I haven't been blogging much. One of the reasons is I've really busy working on courseware for Microsoft on Windows Server AppFabric. If you are in Europe and interested in AppFabric - you should come to Brussels in June - Codit sign up today! Expect more blogging soon. I'll also be in Las Vegas next week as part of the Visual Studio 2010 Launch - come by and say hi - I'll give you a cool t-shirt! (can't talk about it until Monday )

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