Jesus Rodriguez's WebLog

Advanced .NET Remoting Second Edition is now available:

Ingo Rammer and Mario Szpuszta have updated the popular book "Advanced .NET Remoting" releasing the second edition. Thia book covers all aspecst of .NET Remoting including some that are not documented anywhere else. This excerpt has three chapters on Extending .NET Remoting, Developing a Transport Channel, and Remoting Contexts. In this book you learned .NET Remoting from the basics to very advanced topics. In the first chapters, I introduced you to the various kinds of remote objects and how to create and register them. I covered the intricacies of client- activated objects and server-activated objects. You also learned about the various ways of generating the necessary metadata to allow the .NET Remoting framework to create transparent proxies. I showed you the deployment options for remoting servers that can be either managed applications (including console applications, Windows services, and Windows Form applications) and IIS. I then showed you more advanced topics such as security, event handling, versioning, and lifetime management by using leases and sponsors.In the second part of the book, I showed you how .NET Remoting works internally. You were introduced to proxies, messages, transport channels, formatters, message sinks, and channel sinks. After covering those architectural basics, I showed you how to leverage the .NET Remoting framework’s extensibility model by implementing your own sinks and sink providers. At the end of the second part, you finally learned how to implement a complete transport channel from scratch and how to use ContextBoundObject to intercept message calls.

Steve Maine has blogged about Duplex Contracts in Indigo.

IONA gives another step forward in the ESB race. Great job!

Iona Technologies has announced the availability of Artix 3.0, the company's extensible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The upgrades included in Artix 3.0 are designed to strengthen the product's set of enterprise features and functionality including extensibility, platform support and enterprise qualities of service. These improvements expand the range of systems and technologies that Artix users can service-enable and leverage in their service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives.

New features include:

• Enhanced Extensibility Characteristics. Iona states that Artix service-enables existing systems by extending their endpoints with targeted plug-ins. Artix plug-ins can support virtually any protocol, transport, data model, security standard, and development platform, and it also support hot-deployment.
• Broader Platform Coverage. Artix 3.0 extends its platform coverage to include the popular Eclipse and Visual Studio development platforms. Artix 3.0 also includes expanded application platform support for J2EE, POJO and Java servlets, and native C++ containers.
• Improved Enterprise Qualities of Service (QoS) in the areas of security, high availability, management, transaction support and directory services. New enterprise QoS features in Artix 3.0 include X509 certification authentication, active/active client fail over, integration with Tivoli and CA-WSDM, 2PC transaction support, WS-Atomic Transaction support, and UDDI support.

For more information, see ESB vendors enhance their 'SOA middleware'.

Some new features-papers are available to BizTalk developers:

• BizTalk Server 2004 Deployment Guide for Security
  For architects and IT pros: Design and deploy a secure implementation of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 in a multi-computer environment.
• Risk Scoring with BizTalk Server 2004 and the Business Rules Framework
  Get a hands-on, "how-to" lesson and background information on the Business Rules Framework before taking a walk through the component parts of an example solution.   
• Using XML Schemas in BizTalk Server 2004
  This article covers the basic concepts of XML schemas and explains how Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 uses them. Schemas are required for most BizTalk Server applications because they are used to process and validate message information.
• The BizTalk Server 2004 adapter for Oracle is now posted in gotdotnet. A cool way to bring a gap between Oracle databases and BTS applications.

A new series of WebCasts about the different applications blocks that forms the Enterprise Library.

The Patterns & Practices Group has launched a new site to host their weekly webcasts in a centralized location. On the site you can download the PowerPoint slides, hands-on labs, and download the entire webcast. The topics covered include detailed presentations on the blocks that make up Enterprise Library.

Upcoming Webcasts

• Enterprise Library Cryptography Application Block
• Enterprise Library Security Application Block
• Enterprise Library - Building Your Own Application Block
• Enterprise Library Applied
  On Demand Webcasts
• Enterprise Libary Overview
• Enterprise Library Configuration Application Block
• Enterprise Library Data Access Application Block
• Enterprise Library Caching Application Block
• Enterprise Library Logging & Instrumentation Application Block
• Enterprise Library Exception Handling Application Block

Check out all of the webcasts at Patterns & Practics Live.

 The WS-Management related specifications have been updated.

WS-Management (PDF file)

This specification describes a general SOAP-based protocol for managing systems such as PCs, servers, devices, Web services, other applications, and other manageable entities.

WS-Management Catalog (PDF file)

This specification defines the default metadata formats for the discovery part of WS-Management. The catalog is used to discover available management resources such as network adapters or disk drives.

Heather Kreger (kreger@us.ibm.com) have wrote a nice article about the WSDM fundamentals. You can reach it here…

JSR 261, Java APIs for XML-based Web Services Addressing, is starting it's work this week. It will define a framework for supporting transport-neutral addressing of Web services based on the specification from W3C WS-Addressing WG. The group is well represented by the major Web services players but we are still accepting additional applications, specially from smaller companies or expert individuals.

I would like to thanks to Erik Leaseburg  from Microsoft Premier Services for all the corrections made to my last article.