Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

For quick and easy prototypes, you’ve got to admire ASP.NET MVC and WCF RIA Services. These approaches may not be perfect out-of-the-box but they’re structured much better than the old “bind a dataset to a grid and let it fly” approach of 2003. As easy as these approaches are, I’m always looking for ways to make things easier. I get a lot of bang for my buck by using SQLite as an in-memory database whenever I create a new MVC or RIA Services solution. In fact, I create 4 SQLite databases with each new solution: one each for application data, test data, membership/role data, and logging/tracing data. Below I’ve described the techniques I make use of to utilize each of these databases.

One of the things I’m often asked to do for clients is to create an applicability matrix. That is, which technology applies best to which particular challenges in an enterprise? There would seem to be an acute need for this type of clarification in the realm of Microsoft’s service technologies. With the recent releases of Web Process Activations Services (WAS) on Windows Server 2008, WCF 3.5 and 4.0, Windows Server AppFabric, BizTalk 2009 and 2010, and Windows Azure AppFabric, the waters of Microsoft’s service and integration technologies is muddy indeed. In this post, I’m going to provide some clarification; explaining what new service and integration offerings are on the way from Microsoft, offering a frame of reference on how I see them applying to enterprise customers, and furnishing references to materials you can use to educate yourself in these technologies.

I’ve had the opportunity to spend the last week or so investigating a system integration challenge involving PowerBuilder and .NET communicating with web services hosted on a mainframe. It’s been an interesting experience that’s enabled me to dive deep into .NET and to learn a bit about where PowerBuilder is at and where it’s heading. My outtakes follow:

• What’s .NET got to do with it? I was totally perplexed at first when I got asked to assist with a challenge integrating a PowerBuilder client with mainframe web services. I saw .NET in the middle of the diagram but was perplexed “what’s .NET have to do with a PowerBuilder client-to- mainframe integration?”

Three months after the PDC conference and I’m finally catching up on the reading materials I collected in LA. One of the books I picked up was a copy of the Patterns and Practices Group’s A Guide to Claims Based Identity and Access Control. It turns out that this book just RTM’ed and is now available online in PDF and HTML formats.

This book is unique in the Microsoft world. You can find all kinds of books that scratch the surface of application and web service security. If you’re looking to dive deep and understand Claims-based identify and federated security, you were relegated to piecing bits of information from blogs, MSDN, and other sources – until this book arrived. The books takes a topic that is complex and difficult to comprehend and approaches it from the perspective of several personas: a security specialist, software architect, developer, and operations manager. While this is by no means an O’Reilly Heads-First style book, the persona approach, professional illustrations, simple metaphors, and meaningful examples go a long way towards making the material much more digestible.