Couple of weeks ago I got a paper copy of book Pablo Cibraro, Kurt Claeys, Fabio Cozzolino, Johann Grabner - Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4. This book has not a lot of pages, just about 400. Really, I don’t remember when I saw so thin book about some technology. But maybe this book has not a lot pages, but a lot of interesting themes.

First chapter is patterns and principles of SOA applications. This is the best chapter in this book. When I was reading this chapter I saw that authors have a lot experience of creating applications with Service-oriented architecture. Authors described all possible architecture principles, with which you can create SOA applications. And they did not limit themselves to the principles that are possible with WCF. I think that this chapter is “must read” for all developers, it is doesn’t matter what technologies you are using: php, java or .net. And this is good luck that Wrox published this chapter online: Design Principles and Patterns. It is about 30 pages, so read it right now.

Passing array/list/set to stored procedure is fairly common task when you are working with Databases. You can meet this when you want to filter some collection. Other case – it can be an import into database from extern sources. I will consider few solutions: creation of sql-query at server code, put set of parameters to sql stored procedure’s parameter with next variants: parameters separated by comma, bulk insert, and at last table-valued parameters (it is most interesting approach, which we can use from MS SQL Server 2008).

XDT Transformation is a new feature of ASP.NET 4.0 named Web.Config Transformation.

Scott Guthrie: "In most real-world deployment scenarios, the web.config file you use for development is different than the one you use for production deployment. Typically you want to change environment settings like database connection-strings, making sure debug is turned off, and enabling custom errors so that end-users (and hackers) don’t see the internals of your application."

But the chief problem of this feature - is working only with web.config files.

I investigated this problem, and wrote Config Transformation Tool, which gives opportunity to use XDT Transformation Syntax like at Deployment Web Application Project for any files. This tool is very easy, it just run msbuild task, which do this transformation.