Archive for March, 2008

Resharper 4.0 good news and a little WPF databinding

Friday, March 21st, 2008

It’s been tough doing development in Visual Studio 2008 without ReSharper for the last several months, but as much as I enjoy ReSharper, C# 3.0 trumps it. I’ve occasionally installed the Nightly Builds of ReSharper 4.0, but the sea of red around my LINQ code always resulted in the install not lasting very long. Luckily, the most recent “works here” nightly build of ReSharper 4.0 (build 755) looks pretty usable. The only notable issue I’ve found is that it doesn’t like non-trivial LINQ queries inside of static methods, which is a pain but perhaps not a showstopper.

Speaking of LINQ, Brian Stoker has a nice introduction to WPF Databinding with LINQ to SQL over on The Code Project. I’ve been meaning to learn more about this for a while and Brian’s article did a great job of introducing enough information to get something up and running without being overwhelming.

Posted in dotnet | 6 Comments »

Consuming a WCF service from Flex Builder 3

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Flex Builder 3 includes improved support for web services, but the process of getting it to consume a WCF service was still a bit trickier than expected. Here are a few pointers:

  1. Flex only supports up through SOAP 1.1, so doing a web service import fails for the defaults Visual Studio uses. To correct this, modify the WCF service to use basicHttpBinding. Pete Brown has an example on how to do this over in his blog.
  1. The “Import Web Service” wizard doesn’t provide any pointers after it runs on how to use the strongly typed client it generates, but it’s actually pretty straightforward. Check out Build SOAP Clients with Flex Builder 3 over on FlexLive.net. There’s also some good sample code in the comments.

With the above I was able to get a sample WCF service that returns an array of strings working correctly with Flex. I’ll post a followup later with my experiences with more complicated objects — that’s where things have broken down in my experience with SOAP interop in the past. However, supposedly Flex 3’s new support is based on Apache Axis which is pretty well regarded, so fingers crossed.

Posted in general | 2 Comments »