Archives
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Web Service Studio
Those of you who interact with and develop XML web services on a regular basis are probably very familiar with this tool or have other tools that you have purchased/developed to provide similar functionality, but I came across the Web Service Studio (http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=65a1d4ea-0f7a-41bd-8494-e916ebc4159c) last night while working on a little web service project and I think it is great… It is straight-forward in its operation, and doesn’t have alot of “jazz” to the UI, but it does what it is designed to do… which is providing you with a means of interacting with Xml web services in an adhoc fashion. I used it primarily as a testing tool, to validate that the web services I was creating worked as they should. There are many other tools that one could use for performing such a validation… the built-in test page (only works on the local machine), building a custom client such as a winform app (this works, but requires a custom build for each web service which is hardly efficient), using a tool such as InfoPath to quickly build a test form (again, very effective, but requires a new form for each web service). Web Service Studio allows me to simply point to a url after which it will read the WSDL, enumerate the methods available to me, generate the proxy, and let me test/probe each request right there… better yet, it allows me to see the raw XML request being sent back and forth for each “post” so I can see what the request/response needs to look like for non-webservice-friendly (i.e. you have to hand-craft the XML) SOAP clients. Anyway, if you are working with Xml Web Services on a regular basis and need a simple (and free) testing tool, this tool is definitely worth looking at.
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VisualStudio.Net.2005.Beta2(firstExperience) == Really.Good;
Wow… early this morning was the first time that I was really able to spend some time with the new Visual Studio 2005 beta… and let me join the majority of the blogsphere in saying that I’m quite impressed. My task today was a simple one… that of converting a primarily content-focused website that I had build using Dreamweaver MX to ASP.NET 2.0. The following are some general impressions…