I meant to post this before the event but neglected to. Over the weekend I spoke on SOA and WCF at the San Diego Rock and Roll Code Camp held at the UCSD extension in La Jolla, CA (http://www.socalcodecamp.com/).

I participated in 5 sessions with my esteemed Neudesic colleague Chris Rolon:

  • SOA - first principles, benefits, and best practices
  • Introduction to WCF - full tour of capabilities and many code demos
  • WCF Deep Dive - here Chris and I just build anything the group wants in an hour
  • WCF Design Patterns - survey of popular design patterns (mostly Gregor Hohpe's) and how you would implement them using WCF

I've given these talks before, but they continue to get more and more refined over time. I'm also starting to work the ESB concept into these talks, as I believe it's the ESB that puts the A in SOA and makes large collections of autonomous services manageable.

The WCF Deep Dive is always very interesting. Chris and I just ask the room what they want to build--absolutely anything--and we try to pull it off on an hour. When we did this at Desert Code Camp a month or so ago in Phoenix, we built a service and client that did business oriented work, submitting purchase orders. This time, the room wanted to see security at work, including determining the Windows identity of a client and limiting some service methods to users with specific authorizations. Not a problem, since Chris is Mr. Security at Neudesic, but we did have to scramble a bit to remember the fine details of setting security properties in code and config. It's always a little challenging to "fly without a net" like this, but it's a really good way to make sure we know our subject matter well. And, it's fun.