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Visual Studio Orcas and WF/WCF/WF Rules Changes

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If you don’t know already, the Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” March CTP is released to the web here.The combined WCF and WF teams added the following functionalities to Orcas: 

· WF Designer and Debugger integration with Visual Studio

· WF & WCF integration:

o New WCF Send and Receive Activities

o Enhanced Workflow and Service hosting

· Enhancement to WF Rules:

o Added support for operator overloading

o Added support for the “new” operator to allow users to new up objects and arrays from WF Rules

o Added support for extension methods to make user’s experience calling extension methods from WF Rules compatible with how they code in C#

· Partial Trust support in WCF when using the BasicHttpBinding

· Enhanced REST/POX Support in WCF

· RSS and Atom Programming Model

· Atlas Integration, end-to-end programming model for building Ajax style web applications using WCF services

· Support for OASIS specifications WS-AtomicTransaction 1.1, WS-Coordination 1.1, WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1, WS-SecureConversation 1.3, and WS-Trust 1.3

· New Templates for simplified WCF Service Authoring

In addition, we fixed a couple of issues that we got feedback about from customers, like you.

Check the Orcas release notes (aka readme) here for a list of known issues with the CTP and how to workaround them. In addition, Matt Winkler, our platform evangelist friend, listed a couple of caveats with the CTP here.

CTPs are a great opportunity for us to get some feedback from our customers, so check Orcas out and let us know what you think about the bits. If you have any feedback or questions about the WCF and the WF pieces you should contact us via the public WF forums here and the WCF forums here. You can also contact me via my blog here. If you have any feedback or questions about Orcas, you should use the Visual Studio Orcas forums here.

Enjoy Orcas.

--Moustafa