Excel Services: Develop A Calculation Engine For Your Apps

.NET RIA Services relies heavily on metadata annotations for expressing intent beyond what can be inferrd via convention. For example, validation rules on entities and members can be declared as annotations, which then enable a variety of consumption scenarios. We also have metadata for describing model aspects in DAL-agnostic fashion, and hints for automatic UI-generation. What we have today is just a first step.

Glenn Block explains how the Managed Extensibility Framework, a new library coming in .NET Framework 4.0, tackles the longstanding issue of building applications and components that can be reused and extended by others. Learn how to build apps that can use new functionality introduced by developers, framework authors and third-party extenders.Glenn BlockMSDN Magazine February 2010

VPL, part of Robotics Developer Studio is intended for novice programmers, but is also useful for testing and prototyping. We write a simple serial port service that allows you to send and receive data.Trevor TaylorMSDN Magazine February 2010

To better understand how SOA patterns can be applied to Windows Azure deployments, we walk you through a scenario in which a bank moves its services to the cloud.Thomas Erl, Arman Kurtagic, Herbjörn WilhelmsenMSDN Magazine January 2010

Yes, you can run background processes in the cloud. Kevin Hoffman and Nate Dudek use a shopping cart example to demonstrate how to build an application engine as well as implement asynchronous messaging and processing using Azure Storage.Kevin Hoffman, Nathan DudekMSDN Magazine January 2010

Many early adopters cloud platforms have questions about security. We review some of the cryptography services and providers in Windows Azure along with some security implications for applications in the cloud.Jonathan WiggsMSDN Magazine January 2010

Kirk Evans shows how to take advantage of SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services (BCS) to develop solutions with deep integration of external data and services. BCS builds upon its BDC predecessor in the key areas of presentation, connectivity, tooling and lifecycle management.Kirk EvansMSDN Magazine December 2009

Over the past few years, federated security models and claims-based access control have become increasingly popular. Platform tools in this area have also come a long way. Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) is a rich identity model framework designed for building claims-based applications and services and for supporting active and passive federated security scenarios.Michele Leroux BustamanteMSDN Magazine November 2009

This article explains how you can use Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0 to claims-enable Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services and browser-based applications. The focus is on the token issuance functionality in AD FS 2.0. You'll find out how to use AD FS 2.0 as an identity provider; set up an AD FS 2.0 security token service (STS) to interact with WCF; federate AD FS 2.0 with your custom STS or another AD FS 2.0; enable Web single sign-on and federation with WS-Federation and SAML 2.0 protocols; and externalize authentication logic through Visual Studio. You'll come away appreciating how AD FS 2.0 and Windows Identity Foundation make programming identity solutions in Windows less of a chore.Zulfiqar AhmedMSDN Magazine November 2009

This article is the third in a series about n-tier programming with the Entity Framework, specifically about building custom Web services with the Entity Framework and WCF. This article looks at features coming in the second release of the Entity Framework (EF4) and how you use them to implement the Self-Tracking Entities and Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) n-tier patterns.Daniel SimmonsMSDN Magazine November 2009