SilverlightShow Interview with Ido Flatow - Presenter at 3 sessions at Visual Studio Live!New York 4-day Conference

In this SilverlightShow interview, we talk with Ido Flatow –presenter of 3 WCF sessions at Visual Stuido Live!New York conference (May 14-17, 2012). The topics of the sessions are: Monitoring and Troubleshooting WCF Services, What's New in WCF 4 and What's New in WCF 4.5.
As we have announced, SilverlightShow is the Social Media Premiere Partner for this conference and we are sending one SilverlightShow member to this conference for free.

About Ido: Ido Flatow is a Microsoft MVP for Connected Systems Development, Microsoft Certified Trainer, senior architect, and trainer at SELA Group International. He has over 14 years of experience in developing, designing and managing information systems, and is currently consulting and lecturing on Entity Framework and web-related technologies, such as WCF, ASP.NET, IIS, Silverlight, and Windows Azure. Ido is the author of Microsoft's Official WCF 4 course (10263A).

SilverlightShow: Hi Ido! Nice to meet you online! You are presenting 3 sessions on WCF in VS Live! New York event, and all three are among the most-awaited sessions at the event. We also have a number of articles on WCF on SilverlightShow, and all of them are highly popular, with WCF RIA Services by Brian Noyes beating all records. Why is that? Why is WCF so important for developers?

IF: Today, a lot of the applications we develop are distributed applications with various front-ends (desktop, mobile, web) and back-ends, and these two parts need to communicate with each other. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is the framework that allows us to create that connection, by enabling us to create services that can be accessed from everywhere using various ways of communication, such as HTTP and TCP. WCF is all about connecting distributed systems, whether they are entirely written in .NET or have parts of them written in other platforms, such as Java, PHP, JavaScript, or even native C++ - WCF is interoperable and uses a lot of standards, such as the WS-* protocols, in order to provide that ability.

SilverlightShow: What the most challenging feature, or aspect of WCF, where do developers struggle most?

IF: I think that most WCF developers would agree with me when I say that the most challenging part of WCF is the pile of configuration you sometimes have to write in order to host your service. That is actually one of the issues that are well known about WCF, and in every version of WCF we see more and more improvements that are intended to reduce the amount of configuration we write. In two of my sessions, “what’s new in WCF 4” and “what’s new in WCF 4.5” I will show the configuration simplification that has been done over the years in WCF. In addition to configuration, there is another aspect of WCF that a lot of developers struggle with and that is troubleshooting services. When a WCF service fails the error can vary from a very detailed exception to a disconnected channel without any apparent reason. The problem is that many developers are not familiar with the troubleshooting tools offered by WCF, and on many occasions I find myself answering in forums “please use WCF tracing - that will show you exactly what the problem is”. In my “Monitoring and troubleshooting WCF services” session I plan to show some of these troubleshooting tools, so people can finally have confidence when having to troubleshoot their services.

SilverlightShow: What’s the most interesting or the best use of WCF you are aware of? Can you give an example with some application perhaps?

IF: Well, it’s hard to pinpoint the “best” use of WCF, but I’ve seen WCF taken to the extreme in various scenarios - from applications that load services dynamically according to different devices which are connected to the servers, through highly-secured WCF services that work smoothly with Java clients, to projects that wrote their own WCF transport channels and encoders in order to get the best performance out of WCF.

SilverlightShow: From the total list of 3 sessions, which one do you think would be most challenging for the attendees, and why?

IF: I think that would be the “Monitoring and troubleshooting WCF services”, because unlike the “what’s new” sessions where I show a set of new features, the monitoring session is all about the hidden gems of WCF - a lot of WCF developers are not aware to the variety of monitoring techniques that are given out-of-the-box with WCF, and to the various configurations that affect our service’s performance. The monitoring session is actually part of an advanced WCF workshop I often deliver, and I always hear people, even experienced WCF developers, saying “I didn’t know that, I’ll need to check it out”.

SilverlightShow: Could you disclose some interesting tip/trick/demo that attendees would see in any of your sessions in New York?

IF: For those of you who will miss my monitoring session, here’s a tip - we all know that WCF supports tracing and message logging, and that we need to configure in advance the logging setting. In fact, with WCF 4 you can use WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) to change some of the logging settings in runtime, without stopping your service - this is most useful in production environments when you want to start tracking a problem and therefore need to adjust the service’s logging level. You can read about this feature on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms735120.aspx), or just come to my session and see how it works (my demos will also be available for download afterwards).

SilverlightShow: How and where may conference attendees meet you during the conference?

IF: You can probably track me down between sessions, during the birds-of-a-feather lunch, or at any of the other events during the conference - I will be the one wearing a speaker name tag that says “Ido Flatow”. You can also follow me on twitter (@IdoFlatow) to get updates on my sessions, and links to the slides and demos I will show in my sessions.

Thanks Ido for this interview! Wish you, as well as our free pass winner a great conference event!