The MSDN article Synchronous and Asynchronous Operations explains what options are available to you when using WCF. It even tells me that svcutil.exe has an /async switch. Great!

Now, back to my current home turf, Compact Framework. There is netCFsvcutil.exe, that comes with the Compact Framework Power Toys 3.5. Guess what? That option isn't available in this scaled down rendition of svcutil.

Once again Compact Framework makes it so much harder to work productively, and here's why:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2e08f6yc.aspx

Quote: Asynchronous delegates, specifically the BeginInvoke and EndInvoke methods, are not supported in the .NET Compact Framework.

Back to the drawing board and the thread pool (most likely).

I have posted an updated version

Given my plans to rather sooner than later upgrade my server to IIS7, I am currently switching all applications to ASP.NET 2.0 in preparation of this move. But there was nGallery, which I used all over the place when I needed a photo gallery...

Today I decided it was about time to do something about it, and gave converting nGallery to .NET 2.0 a try (actually all the projects target .NET Framework 3.5). Turns out it took me roundabout two hours for this whole endeavour. To save everybody else time, here is my VS2008 solution tree:

nGalleryTNG.zip (2.92 MB)

What is changed compared to the original nGallery 1.6.1 for ASP.NET 1.1? Here is a somewhat complete laundry list:

• Converted it to a Web Application project
• Placed all third party source code in the ThirdParty folder. That way I can always change and recompile if necessary.
• Took all static images from the \photos directories and put them into \images. No more mixing the photo handler & photo cache with the Web site's images.
• The album handler is now being abused in Application_BeginRequest, plus it now uses RewritePath. Fixes the darn Server.Transfer errors.
• Moved the configuration of nGallery from the data folder to App_Data. Other than that: no configuration changes.

I did not switch to ASP.NET 2.0 master pages, it still uses the old user control approach. But after all, I only needed it in a working fashion for 2.0+.

Note: I only tested the XML-based storage because that's how I use nGallery. The SQL-storage has received no testing whatsoever!

Download Web site files only: nGalleryTNG_WebSite.zip (924.39 KB)

I posted a version of the Really Simple Guestbook - With XLinq for Orcas Beta 2 earlier on this blog. Today, I updated this small application for VS2008 RTM. The following changes are incorporated:

• It is now a Web project, no longer file system based
• It includes AIP for form spam protection (aka captcha)

I decided to not include the Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library V1.5, that is up to the reader if additional security is required (note: you'd have to add this to AddEntry.aspx's logic of inserting new guestbook entries).

Download: XlinqGuestbook.zip (165.53 KB), License: BSD

I updated the TFS Code Comment Checking Policy so that it works with VSTS 20008 RTM. The downloaded labeled as Beta 1 comes with the well-known setup, the changes to the August test version are only minimal: the parser has been updated (to better support C# 3.0), and all projects now target .NET Framework 3.5.

Please use the discussions to report any issues you find.

Been on holidays, at conferences (eg last week Ask The Experts @ XTOPIA in Berlin), and worked on various projects - a couple of reasons it was rather quiet lately in this blog.

Yesterday I decided I needed a simple guestbook application for a to-be-developed private Web site, and because I didn't find anything that fit my needs I decided to write one myself with the goal of (ab)using XLinq in the course of this endeavour:

Guestbook_XLINQ.zip (7.09 KB)

Caveat emptor: I am no designer (surprise!). But thanks to no design it should be easy for you to add your own design. However, as this month's MSDN magazine is all about security, I decided to make the application production-ready security-wise. You'll find a lot of parsing plus XSRF protection (note: this version does not check for integer overflow in calculating the start row).

Missing features: this guestbook is not prepared for localization, nor does it use a control-based approach (where you drop those in your pages and get an in-place guestbook).

Update a version of this application for VS2008 RTM is available here.