Perth .NET User Group meeting: Delivering on the Promise of SOA with Bill Poole

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, April 3rd to hear Bill Poole talk about delivering on the promise of SOA. It is a commonly held belief that transitioning to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) simply involves exposing a bunch of Web services. If only it were that easy! SOA is currently receiving much attention and is surrounded by considerable hype. As such, it is often misrepresented by various industry stakeholders in pursuit of their own agendas.

In this session, Bill will cut through the hype and misinformation surrounding SOA and provide a clear practical description of the design patterns and best practice that will help developers deliver on the promise of SOA.

TOPIC: Delivering on the Promise of SOA with Bill Poole
DATE: April 3rd, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome.

Bill Poole is a Senior Consultant with Change Corporation, primarily consulting in Solution Architecture. With over nine years of industry experience, his professional interests include SOA, systems integration, large scale application development, as well as design patterns and best practice. More details here.

Spelunking in the .NET Compact Framework

If you are using the .Net Compact Framework 3.5 and need to delve into memory allocations or performance related issues, then the Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5, released mid-December last year, are what you need. The word ‘toy’ in the title is perhaps a little misleading, as it contains some powerful tools:

  • NETCF CLR Profiler – provides detailed views of the managed heap for diagnosing various memory management issues.
  • NETCF Service Model Metadata Tool – allows you to generate a WCF client proxy to help consume WCF services on device.
  • App Configuration Tool – on device tool for specifying what version of NETCF an application will run against, displaying installed versions of NETCF and displaying information about GAC DLLs.
  • Remote Logging Configuration Tool – enables users to configure logging options on a NETCF device including: loader, interop, network, error and finalizer logs.
  • Remote Performance Monitor and GC Heap Viewer – provides real time counter data (ranging from Garbage Collector activity to type loading info) on a running NETCF application. The GC Heap Viewer feature allows you to capture a snapshot of the managed heap while your application is running to view live references, and allows you to compare multiple snapshots to find memory leaks.
  • NETCF Network Log Viewer – utility for viewing NETCF network log data.

If, like me, you are using the .NET Compact Framework 2.0, you still have access to the Remote Performance Monitor (SP1) and the GC Heap Viewer (SP2). Steven Pratschner’s blog entry “Analyzing Device Application Performance with the .Net Compact Framework Remote Performance Monitor” is a quick introduction to getting started with the RPM.

David Kline has a post describing the counters viewable through the RPM
here.

Quick Tip: if you click on “View GC Heap” in the RPM, don’t keep clicking it when nothing appears! It takes a while to gather the required info… 🙂
Why would anyone sane think a click hadn’t registered? Well, I swap my mouse from left to right hand, and quite often remote desktop into machines without the mouse buttons reversed, so my finger sometimes ‘forget’ which button is a left-click!

Readify are entering the WA Market

I sometimes lament that Perth is so far from the Eastern States, we miss out on free training events and international speakers. Well we won’t be missing out on the Readify Developer Network events for much longer, as Readify are going to be establishing an office in Perth! More news to follow….

Perth .NET User Group meeting: Real World WCF with David Shields

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, March 6th to hear David Shields present on WCF. In this session, David will talk about a real life implementation of WCF and WS-Eventing. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is designed to offer a manageable approach to distributed computing, broad interoperability, and direct support for service orientation.

TOPIC: A real life of implementation WCF with David Shields
DATE: 6th March, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All are welcome.

David Shields is a Solutions Architect and Senior .Net Developer at Fujitsu, Western Australia, currently leading a development with Western Australia Police on a Multi-Jurisdictional Person of Interest search facility. David has been in the industry since before VB 1.0 (!) and before that had a 12 year military career in communications and security.

We will have a few goodies to give away: a Resharper license donated by JetBrains, a copy of “Head First Design Patterns” donated by O’Reilly, and a laptop/attaché carry case from Microsoft. Talent International will be providing beer and pizza. If you want a seat, try to arrive early.