August 2003 - Posts
The one or the other of you might already know it. But it is so important
that I want to explicilty point it out here.
I just listened to Don Box's heavily
discussed MSDNTV show and it was full of interesting information - of
course ... but what I want to repeat here is a small sidenote in his section on
"Extensibility makes abstraction expensive". He talked about the extensibilty
mechanisms and hooks in MTS/COM+ and why they are not meant to be for the public
and they are actually bad ... then he shifted over to .NET:
" .. in .NET we have the so called the .NET context architecture, which
is undoc'ed [...] we're gonna kill it. [...] We will keep it working
forever, but it's a dead end ..."
He further explained that interop with MTS/COM+ was the primary goal of this
implementation (which I guess they wanted to completely hide by marking it
internal, but eventually it got public somehow ...) - I suppose we should live
with it and avoid things like this or that - or at least try to avoid building
'rock-solid' architectures on top of it. So we all hope to see and hear more
about future plans and how all of this is related to the magic Indigo at PDC in LA.
For my current project, I have been on the search for some great looking,
fully functional and really cheap (read: free) Windows Forms controls. I
searched a bit via Google and
found the wonderful and outstanding controls page by Tim
Dawson. Whenever you need such controls for docking windows, enhancing
menues and a fantastic toolbar - well, here you get it!
And if you are in
love with Outlook do not hesitate...
Side note: I do not like (in terms of cost) what I found so far
in the 'official' Windows Forms control gallery.
Microsoft released an SDK to access several download sites via an XML Web
services-based API.
Use the Microsoft.com Web Service SDK to start developing applications
that integrate download information into your applications, business processes,
and Web sites.
The Microsoft.com Web Service is an XML Web service that will enable
you to integrate information and services from MSDN, Technet, other
Microsoft.com sites, and Microsoft Support. In order to serve as a test for
our new architecture, Version 1.0 of the Microsoft.com Web Service is limited
to providing information about top downloads from Microsoft.com. Future
releases will build on this architecture to provide access to a broader
variety of Microsoft content and services.
It seems, unfortunately, that we cannot access to the Microsoft Knowledge Base through the Web services API ... :-(
It is actually just about downloads.
WS-Policy et. al. This is one of the most appreciated features in the WS-*
cornucopia released over the last months ... it is all about defining policies
for your Web services.
The current implementation in WSE 2.0 (TP) heavily focuses on WS-SecurityPolicy to describe which
security policies are required for communicating with Web services nodes. Aaron Skonnard
provides in his article an overview of WS-Policy and other related
specifications and defines a general framework that can be used and extended by
Web services specifications to describe a broad range of Web services policies.
Check it out on MSDN's XML Web Services Developer Center.
WS-Policy
defines a general framework that can be used and extended by other Web
services specifications to describe a broad range of Web services policies.
WS-Policy defines a policy to be a collection of one or more policy assertions
(see Figure 1).
A policy assertion represents an individual preference, requirement,
capability, or other general characteristic. There are two additional
specifications that define standard sets of policy assertions that can be used
within a policy expression. The Web Services
Policy Assertions Language (WS-PolicyAssertions) specification
defines a set of general message assertions and the Web
Services Security Policy Language (WS-SecurityPolicy)
specification defines a set of common security-related assertions.
WS-Policy provides a flexible and extensible grammar for expressing
policies in a machine-readable XML format. The XML representation of a policy
is referred to as a policy expression. A policy expression is bound to a
policy subject, or in other words, the resource it describes (e.g., a Web
service endpoint). The mechanism for associating a policy expression with one
or more policy subjects is referred to as a policy attachment.
The WS-Policy specification defines the general model and syntax for
policy expressions and policy assertions but stops short of specifying how
policies are located or attached to a Web service. The WS-Policy authors
expected other specifications to address this issue in a variety of ways. The
Web
Services Policy Attachment (WS-PolicyAttachment) specification is
one such specification that defines how to attach policy expressions to XML
elements, WSDL definitions, and UDDI
entries.
Just moved
Ingo in
my MSN Messenger from the '.NET Geeks' to the 'RDs' category. Well my friend,
now you are actually a
Microsoft Regional Director, too;-)
Microsoft released on GotDotNet two new tools which help to get along with the
requirements of WS-I for building interoperable Web services applications:
With the release of WS-I Basic Profile, use these two new tools to
build and consume compliant Web services using the .NET
Framework.
The r2d tool converts RPC/Literal WSDLs
to Document/Literal WSDLs. Use r2d.exe to build and consume RPC/Literal
services using .NET 1.0 or 1.1.
The DeDoc tool removes WSDL
elements that contain children (e.g. WS-I conformance claims)
allowing Add Web Reference and wsdl.exe to consume these
WSDLs.
Doug Kaye has a
very interesting reading on asynchronous Web services. Doug is
the author of the distinguished book
Loosely Coupled.
Get more information on Loosely Coupled.
Doug Davis, ETTK Technical Lead, has an articles series on developerWorks
that talks about how to develop XML Web services with the IBM ETTK:
Just for those of you who are fond of all these abbreviations: ETTK
stands for Emerging Technologies Toolkit and includes the toolkit formerly known
as Web Services Toolkit (WSTK).
Purpose: Help Protect Your Computer Today (Immediately)
Action: Read about the Blaster worm and update your software immediately. Check the Security site for
more information and steps you should take to help protect your systems.
URL: http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/blast.asp
BeaconIT, Parasoft, and IBM have started to seed a project called WSVT - the Web Service Validation Tools. The contributed code includes WS-I Test Tools, a WSDL 1.1 Validator, and integration of these tools into the Eclipse IDE. WS-I members will continue work on this code at Eclipse. The tools can be run from the command line or the IDE. There are also plans to develop Ant tasks.
The Web Service Validation Tools Project contains a set of Eclipse plugins that provide Web service validation functions. This includes plugins to assist in determining if a Web service conforms to the guidelines defined in a WS-I Profile.
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