I stumbled upon a link that talks about the end of Flash and Silverlight: http://debuggerdotbreak.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/the-bell-tolls-for-flash-and-silverlight-isnt-far-behind/

I do not think that Silverlight is dead yet. There are a lot of developers with WPF / XAML skills who are comfortable building Silverlight apps. It is preferrable to use Silverlight for line-of-business (LOB) applications within the Windows desktop environment. But, there are some conflicting messages about Windows 8.

The metro UI in Windows 8 is primarily targetted for the tablet users. Windows 8 cold boots in 4 seconds. Metro itself seems to be really good. But, what is bad for Silverlight developers is that Metro is based upon HTML 5 and not Silverlight. The Metro UI in Windows 8 has a browser that does not support any plugins including Silverlight. If you want to experience Silverlight apps in Windows 8, you will have to click on the desktop tile, and use the browser from there. So, using Silverlight for consumer applications is not a good idea. But for business apps, it is still a very good choice.

The other thing that is somewhat confusing is that Windows 8 does not run apps built for Windows phone. If you buy a mobile device and a tablet both running Windows, the chances are that you may have to buy two versions of the same app - one for the tablet and another for the mobile. This can lead to a slightly different user experience. Also, from a developers perspective, developers have to write different implementations for the mobile and the tablet.

This is early days as Windows 8 is available for developers to preview. I am sure a lot will change before Windows 8 goes live. Silverlight applications will run from the browser on the desktop tile. Also, Silverlight Out of browser applications will run as a tile from the Metro UI. So, Silverlight will live for sometime. I am looking forward for the next release of Silverlight - Silverlight 5 for more directions on its future.

My development environment is WCF 4 / IIS 7.5 / Windows 7 Professional. I have a WCF service with a single operation that sleeps for 2 seconds. My goal is to run 100 concurrent requests and ensure that all the requests complete within 2.1 seconds.

I started tinkering with service throttling. A service can have a service behavior which has throttling properties defined. So, I set the following parameters:

<serviceThrottling maxConcurrentInstances="100"
maxConcurrentCalls="100" maxConcurrentSessions="100" />

I went into perfmon and check the ServiceModelService => TimeOutService => Instances counter. It was showing as 10.

I assumed that there was some problem with the processModel. So, in machine.config, I changed the processModel to:

<processModel autoConfig="false"
minIOThreads="100" minWorkerThreads="100"
maxIOThreads="100" maxWorkerThreads="100" />

In perfmon, the instances counter was showing as 10. So, I went and checked the .NET CLR LocksAndThreads => w3wp => Total logical threads. This counter was showing somewhere between 30 and 40.  Again, very confusing.

After searching for more information, I found this forum post which suggests that Windows 7 has some limitations on performance tuning: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcf/thread/449c17ca-1518-49f7-a58e-c043f0751bce/ . I wish I had checked this post earlier!

Here are some good articles in DNK for this month:
http://blogs.dotnetkicks.com/best-of-dnk/2011/11/02/best-net-articles-of-october-2011-fresh-off-the-presses/

I have been working on an interesting assignment involving Exchange web services (EWS). If you want to get started using EWS Managed API SDK, here is how you can:
http://blogs.dotnetkicks.com/vijayst/2011/11/getting-started-with-ews-managed-api-sdk/

I have been working on Silverlight and MVVM for the past few weeks. PRISM is an implementation of MVVM pattern. Here is the project in Codeplex:
http://compositewpf.codeplex.com/