February 2003 - Posts
I absolutely agree with
Anil. He
complains that mobile devices (such as my little iPaq running the .NET Compact Framework) do currently have no (official) support for all the WS-* stuff. Or better said: Please Microsoft, give us a WSE implementation for the CF! There is
a partial implementation of DIME and WS-Security for the CF by
Casey Chesnut, but hey: although this guy is really bright and hard working, we need this as an integral part from the manufacturer itself.
But I have the dim feeling that such a support is not under the top five issues to be currently looked at in Redmond :-(
No comment - just read Clemens' post about his meeting with Steve Swartz and Don Box. Great :-)
I had a fantastic dinner with Don and Steve Swartz (Steve should start a blog so I can finally link to him and so that he can share his infinite wisdom; folks, you don't know what you're missing). Great Indian food and surprisingly good beer -- and we Germans have pretty high standards.
This is comforting - I stand confirmed, as well as
Yasser (especially his
great article in MSDN Magazine) and many, many others, too. ASP.NET's [WebMethod] feature is very cool, but I must say that it can lead to sham ... you really tend to see the Web Services world just as another OO or RPC thingie. No! It is all about messages. Period!
Read
Tim Ewald's excellent
MSDN article on XML Web Services as a message based communications means - OK, the main tenet is about showing how to access the raw SOAP message in ASP.NET Web Services (which is really interesting stuff, I also have a working implementation for this). But the really important message is in the few sentences in the introduction - be sure not to miss them!
I love this application. I have been using CapeClear's WSDL Editor for about a year or so (although it is written in Java ;-)). Now they have updated the bits on their homepage - go and get it if you are doing Web Services development. Here are some of the highlight features (from the tool's homepage):
- Intuitive graphical environment for viewing and editing WSDL files.
- Web services creation wizard, which automates the creation of service definitions, port types, binding, template operations, and messages.
- Fully automated wizards for creating and editing XML Schema, schema arrays, complex types, simple types, and enumerations.
- Support for validation where WSDL is tested against WSDL schema.
- Support for advanced WSDL capabilities such as imports, faults, SOAP headers, multiple bindings, and parameter ordering.
- WSDL 1.1 specification support.
- Retrieval of WSDL from across networks, UDDI repositories, or Internet locations.
- Full support for WSDL documentation.
But don't forget about this: you need the 'real' JDK installed on your machine :-)
Finally! Rob Howard,
ASP.NET Program Manager, is
blogging again, and you guess where? Of course:
dotnetweblogs.com.
Welcome Rob.
OK, so here we go. I decided to write up some articles about the XML Web Services capabilities in the .NET Framework (ASP.NET and .NET Remoting). The technical difficulty ranges from beginner-level to in-depth discussion. Time will show how deep I can get ;-)
Here is the first one:
Mixing the Web Services Cocktail - How ASP.NET does XML Web Services
BTW, this article has been published in a modified version on http://www.csharpnewsletter.com/ (has been stopped for a while now).
Perhaps I am not the only one who thinks of Depeche Mode when reading about BPEL(4WS). Anyway, here is a great site which has a lot of information all around BPEL: quick start, downloads, code samples and many, many more. BTW, BPEL stands for Business Process Execution Language (for Web Services) and is Microsoft's, IBM's and BEA's proposal for the Web Services collaboration/orchestration/choreography or whatever 'war'. We should expect to see the first Microsoft BPEL implementations in the next BizTalk Server ...
Don't miss this when you are talking Web Services!
Craig has posted a very smart implementation of his 'final' .NET configuration section handler. His idea was so simple that it is actually brilliant: he took XmlSerializer and lets it do all the work ... this is the last config section handler you will ever need. Just write your custom .NET type, map the handler to your XML section, type the appropriate XML values in this section - voila! Cool and impressive.
Check it out.
I received an email from Paul Wilson. He pointed me to his article where he describes a cool mechanism to keep your ASP.NET application alive between requests.
ASP.NET web applications only keep running for as long as there are some active sessions -- then they shut down until there is another page request. This means that if your site isn't always getting hits, then it will stop, and later requests will have to endure the slow startup and recompilation. It also means that you cannot ever expect your ASP.NET web applications to periodically perform a background task, since it may not be running.
Go ahead and check out his bits. But beware of any side effects ... ;-)
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