I need to learn WCF for my project as I am building a client-server application under Windows. What's the best place to start. I've googled for tutorials and books but I couldn't find something suitable for starters. I would prefer a book.
As for resoures: there's the MSDN WCF Developer Center which has everything from beginner's tutorials to articles and sample code.
Also, check out the screen cast library up on MSDN for some really useful, 10-15 minute chunks of information on just about any topic related to WCF you might be interested in.
Look at PluralSight videos may be its easy way for you to start. Some of the videos are on MSDN for free.
Find book for yourself. For example this one could be easy to understand for beginner.
Look at WCF samples. Some samples can help you in learning.
If you prefer a good book, check out Programming WCF Services, 3rd Edition by Juval Lowy.
Other WCF book recommendations are listed in this question.
What have been some of the most helpful resources for learning Blend from a developers perspective?
I suspect in the end we will hand off the XAML of our app to a design expert, but until that blessed day there are some things even a coding grunt should be able to manage in Blend that are painful in Visual Studio (styles for example)
Have you checked out the Microsoft training site? There is also lynda.com which has some free training to make use of. Overtime I have found the videos to the most rewarding, as walking through static screenshots is not very beneficial. Especially when attempting to understand the layout of Blend and making use of the varying tools within the product.
In addition, since you mention Silverlight, Tim Heuer has a blog which covers Silverlight and at times touches on Expression Blend. There is also Jesse Liberty who has since moved into WP7 to some degree but has varying tutorials on his web site which again touch on Blend to some degree. Both Tim and Jesse work for Microsoft so they can often times provide insightful information and are fairly active within the community in getting questions answered.
I've been trying to find a good advanced Silverlight 4 course, but can't really find anything. I've found this:
http://www.develop.com/training-course/silverlight-4
But the most interesting topics are only talked about in the course material, not in the actual course. The extra topics from this course which is of particular interest, are:
Working with Files: local files, Isolated Storage, data files, zip files.
Extensibility: working with MEF to build extensible applications
PRISM: using PRISM (Composite Application Guidance) to structure Silverlight applications
Also: Test driven development with Silverlight would be good to learn better.
Does anyone know anyone who gives good courses which include these topics? I'm not a total Silverlight newbie, but not an expert either. Preferably the course will be held in Europe or Eastern USA.
Chr.
Agilitrain offers an advanced course. Check out https://agilitrain.com/. This is the company that offers the "Silverlight Tour" courses. I haven't been to any of their offerings, but the instructors are well known in the Silverlight arena. (Shawn Wildermuth and Erik Mork are two of them.)
Take a look at the web site. They display full course outlines and bios of the instructors.
The prices (as with any course) are hefty for an independent programmer/consultant, but if you have a corporation footing the bill, the prices seem a bit more competitive.
Here's a good resource for MEF and Prism: http://development-guides.silverbaylabs.org/
Erik provides some really useful videos explaining the topics. Not exactly a course per se though.
And here is Channel9's collection of Silverlight 4 training courses: http://development-guides.silverbaylabs.org/
There's at least one covering MEF.
The following is a link to ScottGu's blog. This is another collection of pretty useful Silverlight 4 training videos: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/04/22/silverlight-4-training-kit.aspx
That should be a good start. :)
I'm looking for any beyond basic resources that can help me to be proficient with WCF.
I found Microsoft Virtual Labs that are pretty good but I'm looking for more. I'd really appreciate if you point me to more resources.
Thanks a lot.
There's a really good book my Michele Leroux Bustamante called Learning WCF (something like a pre-cursor to Juwal Lowy's more advanced book). She goes into great detail on all topics of WCF, even some very advanced ones (like federated authentication).
Michele has also recorded a 15-part screencast series on MSDN called "WCF Top-to-Bottom" which is a really great way to get started into WCF programming. Check out her link collection for that series.
Marc
I like Juval Lowy's book.
I posted this community wiki in the hopes of creating a thread of expertise. My question is thus ... "Where do the experts go to learn about the newest coding techniques?".
I'm basically looking for the leading/bleeding edge of architecture, design, development and theory.
I know conferences and trade shows are probably the best venues to see the latest and greatest, but for those on a limited budget (of both time and money) such as myself, I'm looking for websites that I can read in the evenings that will keep me current on what's new in the world.
I program mostly in C# but the websites need not be geared towards C#.
Blogs
Martin Fowler, the best starting point I think. (http://martinfowler.com/)
articles like "Consumer-Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern", "Mocks Aren't Stubs", "Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern" (http://martinfowler.com/articles.html)
David Hayden (http://www.davidhayden.com/)
Reflective Perspective, a good daily feed (http://blog.cwa.me.uk/tags/morning-brew/)
Ayende (http://ayende.com/Blog/)
Eric Lippert - Works on the language. Sometimes read about new C# features before they're announced elsewhere.
Scott Hanselman
Journals
The Architecture Journal (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb410935.aspx) And what's a great option - you can order free, paper based copies!
MSDN Magazine (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/default.aspx)
Community
Codeproject.com, short and large articles
pnpguidance.com, tutorials, blogs and articles
Real applications and devteams
pattern&practices home: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/default.aspx, and P&P products
SCSF, the Smart Client Software Factory home. Learn about desktop enterprise systems. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480482.aspx)
WCSF, the Web Client Software Factory home. Learn about busines(process) oriented web architecures. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264518.aspx)
Enterprise Library
For free - I would recommend MSDN, particularly keep an eye on the C# and .NET technology pages. Lots of blogs, and nearly every announcements about what's up and coming is put there.
Serverside.net
The ondemand(previously recorded) webcasts from Microsoft are normally really good, but it's a painful number of clicks to actually get to the point where you can download the file, and sometimes you find that it is not available.
Also sometimes you can find a .NET User Group locally that will have speakers/sessions occasionally. These are also great ways to network and find out what kind of work is going on in your area.
Books, books, books! Good books are written by subject matter expects, involve input from many sources, are peer reviewed, well structured and go orders of magnitude deeper than trade shows, and most online material. When you buy a book, you get the experience of an expert for a very reasonable price.
NDepend documentation comes with two white books and also online blog posts and articles concerning the architecture for large .NET application:
Partitioning code base through .NET assemblies and Visual Studio projects (8 pages)
Defining .NET Components with Namespaces (7 pages)
Control Components Dependencies to gain Clean Architecture
Re-factoring, Re-Structuring and the cost of Levelizing
Evolutionary Design and Acyclic componentization
Layering, the Level metric and the Discourse of Method
Fighting Fabricated Complexity
I never get to go to PDC, but I do love to watch the videos.
As a previous post mentioned the MS PDC videos are on online. Same with Mix which has good MS Web development related content. Also, for general MS videos there is Channel 9, it's not all technical content, but it's worth searching if you are looking for something in particular.
Someone already mentioned blogs, here are a few more:
Scott Hansleman - lots of stuff on there, a lot of ASP, MVC stuff.
Phil Haack - another good MVC guy.
Rob Connery - again a lot of focus on MVC.
ScottGu - according to his blog he "builds a few products for Microsoft", which has to be the understatment of the year - he is in charge of ASP, IIS, SIlverlight and much more besides at MS.
Check out Sharp Architecture, it's very promising.
I've collected several RSS feeds that I regularly to stay up-to-date on .NET and Agile. If you like I can share the list with you. It contains most of the stuff already mentioned here.