WPF Windows Presentation Foundation

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a next-generation presentation system for building Windows client applications with visually stunning user experiences. With WPF, you can create a wide range of both standalone and browser-hosted applications
The core of WPF is a resolution-independent and vector-based rendering engine that is built to take advantage of modern graphics hardware.

WPF exists as a subset of .NET Framework types that are for the most part located in the System.Windows namespace. If you have previously built applications with .NET Framework using managed technologies like ASP.NET and Windows Forms, the fundamental WPF programming experience should be familiar; you instantiate classes, set properties, call methods, and handle events, all using your favorite .NET Framework programming language, such as C# or Visual Basic.

To support some of the more powerful WPF capabilities and to simplify the programming experience, WPF includes additional programming constructs that enhance properties and events: dependency properties and routed events


Good stuff on WPF is here for beginners : http://www.wpftutorial.net/WPFIntroduction.html

Difference between Cloud Computing and SaaS

Cloud computing :- Cloud Computing is a computing infrastructure that you can rent to deploy your applications without worrying about hardware .


SaaS:- SaaS offerings are complete end user software applications which you can use by paying hourly basis instead of licensing for years.

Improving the ASP.Net application performance

Few points to keep in mind while developing and deploying ASP.Net application.

Create new application pool for your site and ensure that only your application uses this pool.

In machine.config file , set the “retail=true” which will set the debug and tracing options to false . Disabling debug and tracing features for production application will improve the performance.

Implement Ajax wherever possible, this will reduce the full page refresh and increases the application performance by refreshing the parts of the page.

Implement Client side validations instead of using server validation controls. This will decrease the round trips to the server.

Disable the view state for entire page when not needed. Using view state simply will become overhead for webpage and it impacts the page load time.

Don’t store larger amounts of data in sessions . Using sessions will increase the memory consumption at server and brings down the server performance.

Use try/catch/finally blocks only when you are implementing complex functions . Use of exception handling for every simple function will hit the performance.

Enterprise Library

The Microsoft Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development cross-cutting concerns (such as logging, validation, data access, exception handling, and many others).
Software developers can add application blocks to .NET applications quickly and easily. For example, the Data Access Application Block provides access to the most frequently used features of ADO.NET, exposing them through easily used classes


Enterprise Library is a collection of application blocks intended for use by developers who build complex, enterprise-level applications

Advantages :

• Consistency. All Enterprise Library application blocks feature consistent design patterns and implementation approaches.



• Extensibility. All application blocks include defined extensibility points that allow developers to customize the behavior of the application blocks by adding their own code.



• Ease of use. Enterprise Library offers numerous usability improvements, including a graphical configuration tool, a simpler installation procedure, and clearer and more complete documentation and samples.



• Integration. Enterprise Library application blocks are designed to work well together or individually.


Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 contains the following application blocks:






• Caching Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate a cache in their applications. Pluggable cache providers and persistent backing stores are supported.



• Cryptography Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate hashing and symmetric encryption in their applications.


• Data Access Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate standard database functionality in their applications, including both synchronous and asynchronous data access and returning data in a range of formats.



• Exception Handling Application Block. Developers and policy makers can use this application block to create a consistent strategy for processing exceptions that occur throughout the architectural layers of enterprise applications.



• Logging Application Block. Developers can use this application block to include logging functionality for a wide range of logging targets in their applications. This release further improves logging performance.



• Policy Injection Application Block. Powered by the Interception mechanism built in Unity, this application block can be used to implement interception policies to streamline the implementation of common features, such as logging, caching, exception handling, and validation, across a system.



• Security Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate authorization and security caching functionality in their applications.


• Unity Application Block. Developers can use this application block as a lightweight and extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection, as well as instance and type interception.

• Validation Application Block. Developers can use this application block to create validation rules for business objects that can be used across different layers of their applications.



Hands on Labs available at :

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=4f8cd377-5522-4f45-a024-44a6ca5111ec&displaylang=en

Generating metadata from Type Library

COM type definitions usually reside in a type library. In contrast, CLS-compliant compilers produce type metadata in an assembly. The two sources of type information are quite different.


Here is the tutorial that describes techniques on how to generate metadata from a type library. The resulting assembly is called an interop assembly.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xwzy44e4.aspx

Windows Server AppFabric

Windows Server AppFabric is a set of integrated technologies that make it easier to build, scale and manage Web and composite applications that run on IIS.

Windows Server AppFabric hosting features enhance the hosting of .NET Framework version 4 Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) services in the Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) by providing the following capabilities:

• Simplified deployment and management of WCF and WF services hosted in WAS
  
• Simplified configuration of persistence for durable workflows
  
• Customizable tracking profiles that allow you to capture only the data you need
  
• Dedicated, queryable storage for tracked data
  
• Windows PowerShell cmdlets that allow you to create custom management scripts
  
• Customizable monitoring of hosted services
  
• Supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) through Windows IPv6 stack
  
• Automatically starting applications to minimize service latency