I had the chance to attend the Microsoft WCF Firestarter event put on by Microsoft in New York City. It was similar in many ways to the SilverLight event I attended a couple weeks back.  We got to hear from MVPs Miguel Castro and Don Demsak and Peter Laudati, a Microsoft lead evangelist for the New York/Jersey area.  Needless to say these are some brilliant people and boy were the session chalked full of useful information.

One of the big reasons for me attending, outside of my love for community events and a deep interest in WCF, is for the current client project I am working on, we are using WCF in conjunction with the Compact Framework, or as I call it – the bastard Framework child from Microsoft.  Ever wonder why Microsoft fell behind in the smart phone race, try to program with CF against modern standards, yeah not fun.  Really hoping CF4 changes all of that since Apple has shown there is now a tremendous desire among general consumers for smart phones, but that discussion is for another day.  I will say that since WM7 will use SilverLight as the basis for interfaces (which is beyond awesome) I can be almost certain that CF will get wsHttpBinding in addition to the current, and only choice, basicHttpBinding, which is the slowest and least feature rich binding.  But more discussions for later dates.

Perhaps the coolest thing that I got to see in action for the first time was the use of transactions over these services and get some ideas for best practices, though I think Miguel might take things a bit too far, but as I say, to each their own as long as it works.  In the end, the stuff that Peter, Miguel, and Don showed  us just totally blew my mind. It was unfortunate that I attended this event partially sick and without an ‘o’ on my keyboard (was especially difficult when they talked about OData).  I really enjoy the topic of OData, in fact my colleague Chris Woodruff, is doing a national tour (or at least along the East Coast and Chicago) giving workshops on using it.  At this point, not sure if I will be able to attend this, though it would be nice to see a familiar face, been a while for me.

Really the coolest thing I took from the entire day was the feature of Transactions and Synchronization that Miguel showed off. The worst news I got is that since CF only support basicHttpBinding, we are not in good share in terms of speed.  We do have performance tests scheduled for this week, but I do like to have a contingency should things go astray.

Anyway, I will likely be back in Manhattan next weekend to help out with the Microsoft Web Camp.  As for now, I need to get some rest to prevent a relapse. I am quite certain my client will kill me if that happens 🙂