Indigo Beta1 RC: Getting Started

After a painful experience (1, 2, 3, 4) with Indigo CTP last month, I had a relatively smoother experience with Indigo Beta1 RC. It was made available around couple of weeks ago, as reported previously. I took a fresh Win XP + SP2 machine and installed Visual Studio 2005 Beta2, Indigo Runtime and then finally WinFX SDK. I had my first success when the Visual Studio started successfully, unlike last time, after all the installation was completed. The order of installation is important here otherwise it may not work.

Although I installed IIS before installing Visual Studio and Indigo, I thought of checking the registered MIME types (using MMC) for my virtual directory (gettingstarted) and strangely found the list to be empty. So I referred to the online release notes (unfortunately there is no table of contents) and tried registering the Indigo MIME types using aspnet_regiis and xws_reg. But release notes refer to .NET runtime as v2.0.50105 where as my machine shows it to be v2.0.50215. I need to debug what causes this discrepancy.

Anyway, I extracted the samples bundle from WinFX SDK and followed the instructions to setup Getting Started sample. That's where the water got little muddy. There is a note in the beginning of the sample stating that this sample must be installed in <sample_install_folder>\Quickstarts\GettingStarted folder. And then subsequent instructions require you to setup a virtual directory, vroot, pointing to \Quickstarts\vroot. It is not very clear if there is any relationship between the Quickstarts in these two paths. Also, the extracted samples have CS and VB directories to cater to C-Sharp and Visual Basic developers. The documentation does not make it clear if I need to extract the sample from CS directory and copy it in the GettingStarted folder.

Anyway, just to keep things simple I created a gettingstarted virtual directory and point it to the CS folder under GettingStarted. I loaded the GettingStarted.sln in Visual Studio and hit Ctrl+Shift+B to build the solution. And it was exciting to see all the magic and be able to view the endpoint in the browser at http://localhost/gettingstarted/service.svc. And as mentioned in the documentation, the client did get built in client/bin directory. So I just changed the endpoint in client/bin/client.exe.config file to point to http://localhost/gettingstarted/service.svc and invoked the client. I was excited to see the output

Add(100,15.99) = 115.99
Subtract(145,76.54) = 68.46
Multiply(9,81.25) = 731.25
Divide(22,7) = 3.14285714285714

Press <ENTER> to terminate client.

 Here are some doubts that I still need to understand:

• Why cant there be one download bundle for Indigo which consists of Runtime + SDK ? For instance, I may not care about Avalon and other frills that comes along with it.
• Why cant WinFX SDK be also available as a windows installer package along with an ISO image ?
• What caused the discrepancy of .NET runtimes (v2.0.50105 vs v2.0.50215) even though everything seems to work.

Here is what I plan to explore further:

• Understand the samples directory structure so that I can build the samples without any modification
• Understand how the exposed WSDL and Schema are structured
• Try out other samples
• Other stuff as it strikes my fancy