Watching Vittorio Bertocci's Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) introductory talk at PDC as well as the recording of the excellent talk Microsoft Architect Hervey Wilson gave on this subject at PDC09 brought back wonderful memories of long discussions (and arguments ;-)) I had with Stelios, Manolis, Dimos and Stavros back when I was working at DOL, on Federated identity and Microsoft’s offerings on that area. To be honest I skimmed through Hervey's session rather too quickly, got a little confused, jumped over to Vittorio Bertocci’s session and then … gave up. I decided that I needed to look at the...

I’m going to be speaking at the next DotNetZone event on a very interesting topic namely IoC (Inversion of Control) and on how using "Prism" and it's friend Unity (an implementation of IoC) from the Patterns and Practices team that can help in building Silverlight applications in a way that lends itself to testability and modularity. In talking with various colleagues and customers building business applications with Silverlight I find that Prism (and it's friend Unity) is frequently mentioned but not everyone has seen it or use it. So coming next Tuesday 15th of December 19.00 at MIC (Microsoft Innovation Center)...

I briefly got the chance to talk about MetaCMS, the content management system and e-shop platform I’ve designed and built, a while back. Since then a lot of sites have been built using it. Some of which (the biggest ones) include: www.nooz.gr (former www.flash.gr) ...

The patterns & practices team plans to create some new Web guidance and we needs our help prioritizing the requirements through a survey that went live. They have split the effort into 2 projects. The first project will be to update the Web Client Software Factory (WCSF) to run on Visual Studio 2010. The second project will take a fresh look at creating new Web Guidance. Your feedback from the survey will help define the scope for this second project. If you ever used patterns and practices building blocks you’ll know how useful those...

So it’s time for me to reveal what I’ve been up to for the past 6 months. As some of you may already know, I moved to a new start up company about six months ago, called Metadata (I know the site isn’t quite ready yet, but we focused on the product instead of the site), where I was assigned the task of designing and building a solution for Content Management. The company business strategy required a product that would satisfy the needs of every possible client ranging from small companies that need simple websites to large news portal organizations...

Some of you have been asking on my WPFSubsonic project status. Well I have to admit that things have been pretty hectic lately so I haven’t been able to complete it. I still haven’t found a way to pass configuration data on the custom tool but I have thought about it and I’m probably going to use XAML serializer/de-serializer in order to pass a configuration file to the custom tool. For those of you that you simply can’t wait J, I’m posting a first built. In this build the DAL generation happens through...

I’ve been to a number of technical events over the years. Some of them were interesting and informational while others not. Over the last couple of days though, I had the great opportunity to attend a very interesting one, one that rarely takes place. Michael and Daniel presented a Microsoft Hellas sponsored workshop on building real world SOA applications using Microsoft .Net 3.0. Beyond the new .Net technologies which were discussed (but were already familiar to me), this event gave me the opportunity to see, proven at practice, architectural patterns for building Service Oriented applications. I hope that this is...

I don’t know how many of you are interested or follow up on this effort. For those of you that do, I’m happy to say that the first release is very close. The issue I still have to solve before publishing my code is the configuration one. Subsonic uses Web.Config to specify Database connection strings and the .Net 2.0 provider model to specify the Database drivers to be used. All these are configured in a custom configuration section that is read with a WebConfigurationSection descendant class at built time. Since though custom build providers are not available at the Windows Forms platform...