WCF

As a result of the enthusiasm of the excellent Jon Udell blog, http://blog.jonudell.net/
I decided to give Azure Web Services, Microsoft's latest toy, a whirl. So far so good in that it seemed to be a GUI-fied version of Google App Engine...up to the point where I had to create a WCF service in one of the Hands On Labs -- then it all fell apart, and I spent a big chunk of the last four working days trying to get a (any) WCF service running in Visual Studio 2008, despite all the wizards and much searching of news groups and help files. Now, I may have mentioned before that I'm not your natural programmer, so maybe it's down to poor reading skills. Finally I found
http://www.thatindigogirl.com/ (the blog of the lady who is the WCF team leader) and downloaded followed the pdf of Chapter One of her book very carefully indeed, right down to cutting and pasting the configuration file text. As you would expect, she is very thorough and goes into so much detail that even if you miss something, as I still managed to do, there is suficient detail to cross-reference. If you are having trouble with WCF, I highly recommend her book, far over the other WCF books I have come across.
And so finally I have a working WCF service and all that remains is to get the WCF service in the Azure example working and then its off to the races. I hope. In four days I could probably have learned Ruby on Rails, is what I'm thinking :-)